Profitability and fractional CFO

YOUR PROFIT IS LEAKING OUT THE BACK DOOR.

Over-ordering. Labor creeping a percent at a time. A hero dish that's been quietly underpriced since the last menu refresh. The leaks are small until you stack a year of them, and then they're the difference between a great quarter and a brutal one. We find them, plug them, and hand you the number that actually moves profit.

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Prime cost. Cash flow. Expansion strategy.

Margins, protected

Does your accountant do this?

Bookkeeping tells you what happened. We change what's next.

Do you know your prime cost target?

Food plus labor as a share of sales. It's the one number that tells you whether the business model is working, and most restaurants either don't know theirs or are working from the wrong benchmark for their concept.

Are you catching over-ordering and spoilage?

Inventory creep is the quietest margin killer in a restaurant. It doesn't show up on a single invoice, it shows up over six months when somebody finally adds it up. We add it up sooner.

Is the menu priced for margin?

Hero dishes drift underpriced after every food-cost increase. Each underpriced cover bleeds a little. Multiply by your weekly cover count and the leak is significant. We model pricing against your real food cost.

Can you forecast cash for growth?

Adding a second location is often the moment people find out their first one isn't as profitable as they thought. We pressure-test the expansion before you sign the lease, not after the rent payments start.

Fractional CFO for restaurants

CFO firepower, without the full-time hire.

The strategic financial partner most independent restaurants couldn't justify hiring, available the moment you actually need one.

Prime cost benchmarking

Food and labor measured against real restaurant benchmarks, not generic small-business averages. You see where you stand against actual operators in your category and your service style.

Find and plug the leaks

Over-ordering, subscription creep, labor overspend, vendor drift. The leaks are usually small individually and significant in aggregate. We catch them in the data and bring them up before they pile up.

Menu margin modeling

Every dish reviewed against real food cost and current contribution margin. We tell you which items are working, which are quietly losing money, and what the menu should look like next.

Cash flow forecasting

A real forecast you can run on, not a static spreadsheet that goes stale in a week. Cash timing is what kills profitable restaurants, and it's the first thing a CFO should be watching.

Monthly close

A real monthly close, not a quarterly catch-up. The faster the numbers settle, the sooner you can act on them while the period is still warm enough to matter.

Expansion pressure-testing

Second location, new equipment, a renovation, a concept pivot. We model it before you commit so the decision is based on numbers instead of vibes and optimism.

How we turn numbers into profit.

Read the P&L like an operator

We go line by line through food, labor, prime cost, comps, voids, and translate it into plain decisions instead of accounting jargon.

Find where margin leaks

Benchmarks reveal the over-ordering, overstaffing, and pricing gaps that have been quietly costing you, sometimes for years.

Build the plan to grow

Forecasts, pricing, and cash strategy so profit goes up and stays up, with a real plan for what to do next instead of guessing.

Meet Tanya McCaffery, CPA

A CPA who actually owns restaurants.

Tanya is Founder & CEO of VAST and Co-Owner & CFO of Local Food Group , a multi-unit Reno restaurant group. She's built and operated brick-and-mortar restaurants and reviewed thousands of restaurant P&Ls. She reads your numbers like a line cook reads a ticket.

CPA20+ YearsB.S. Accounting, UNRRestaurant OwnerFractional CFO

Great Basin BrewingLiberty Food & WineCucina LupoPizzeria LupoOverland

“Our goal for your business is straightforward. Improve your financial reporting, find efficiencies in operations, and grow profit. Everything we do rolls up to those three.”

The VAST approach

Questions, answered.

What's a fractional CFO?

It's senior financial strategy on a part-time basis. Cash flow, forecasting, pricing, expansion, owner comp, the strategic side of running the business. You get CFO-level thinking without paying a full-time CFO salary.

What is prime cost and why does it matter?

Prime cost is food plus labor as a percentage of sales. It's the clearest single indicator of restaurant profitability, and it's the first thing we benchmark when we start working with you. If prime cost is off, nothing downstream works the way it should.

We're profitable but cash is always tight. Can you help?

Yes, and that combination is more common than people admit. It's almost always a cash-timing problem, and it's exactly what a fractional CFO solves. We smooth the swings and build a forecast you can actually plan against.

Do I need bookkeeping with VAST to get CFO help?

Cleaner books make CFO work much more powerful, so we usually pair them. But we meet you where you are with the three tracks (Start, Fix, Grow) instead of demanding a clean slate before we get to work.