I do your bookkeeping — and tell you when a cost moves, and what it costs you.
Books, payroll, bills and sales tax — your whole admin side, run from my desk. Because every bit of it crosses my desk, I see what your costs are doing: what moved this month, and what it runs you a year. Your food cost and labor benchmarked against where a healthy shop sits, reported every month. Nothing about how you run your day changes — and your tax accountant keeps the taxes, with a clean set of books to file from.
POS or pen-and-paper, either way — handwritten tickets and a drawer of receipts get the same clean books as a full POS. Send it however is easiest: snap a photo, forward the email, drop it in a shared folder, or hand me the stack. Sorting it is my job, not yours — and nothing about how you run your day has to change.
Your statements, closed and read back to you.
This is the work everything else sits on top of. P&L, balance sheet and cash flow, prepared and closed — then the read on them, which is the monthly Financial Health Review. It goes to every shop on Essentials or Full Service. On Intelligence you get the same read, run off the P&L your own bookkeeper produces. Either way it’s monthly work, not a one-time report — and it isn’t the only thing I send. The Kitchen Intelligence Report is a second monthly report, further down this page.
I don’t do taxes — that’s your CPA’s job, and I work alongside whoever files your return. What changes is what lands on their desk. If your books are behind, your CPA is rebuilding your year before they can file it — in the busiest month of their year. Closed monthly, they get a finished set of statements and do the job you actually hired them for.
XYZ Pizza Company
Pittsburgh, PA · Carryout & dine-in · Illustrative sample
Prepared by Forte“First the good news: sales are up 9%, and you’re not handing a quarter of every delivery order to an app — so you keep more of each dollar than most shops I look at.
Here’s the part nobody’s told you. Food and labor together are at 66 cents on the dollar. The band is 60–65, and a well-run shop your size sits around 62 — at your volume every point is about $8,800 a year. Catering is ringing up as carryout, so your best-margin work doesn’t show up anywhere. And nobody has split the menu, so you can’t see whether the dinners are carrying themselves or riding on the pizza.
Split the menu, put catering on its own key, and work food and labor down toward 62. Those four points are roughly $36K a year. The boring first move matters most though: books closed and tied out every month, so we’re steering with real numbers instead of guesses.”
Yours would read like this.
A full Review, start to finish — run on XYZ Pizza, a shop I made up so I’m not showing anyone’s books. On Essentials or Full Service, yours lands in this same format every month: your five numbers against where they should sit, then the short list of what’s actually leaking, each with a dollar figure and a fix.
- Your five numbers, against the line. Food and labor together (prime cost), food %, labor %, channel mix, and what you keep — each shown against the band a healthy pizza shop sits in, so you know at a glance what’s fine and what isn’t.
- Named and priced. Food and labor together are a point and a half over the line, catering has no line of its own, the menu has never been split — each one with a dollar figure on it and what I’d do about it.
- Built on statements that tie out. The P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow behind it agree to the dollar. That’s the difference between a number you can act on and a number you hope is right.
+See the three statements behind it
Want to know what yours would say?
Same read, run on your books instead of my demo shop — one to start, then every month if we keep going. The first call is free and there’s no pitch: we look at where your numbers actually sit and whether this is worth doing at all.
See the full XYZ sample. No email, no form.
The complete Review for XYZ (my sample demo shop) — open it right now and read the whole format before we ever talk. It includes the five numbers on one page: what each should run for a pizza shop, and what it means when one drifts. Your own Review, on your real books, is the paid Financial Health Review.
Trust your rep. Then check the invoice.
Plenty of owners run two or three distributors just to keep one honest. That’s the job I do off the paperwork you already get. Your bookkeeper keys the total and moves on — I keep the line, so every price you pay has a history. When your rep moves block mozzarella eleven cents and doesn’t mention it, you hear it from me that month. It comes to you as the Kitchen Intelligence Report — every month, at every level. Four things: what moved on your invoices, what your food variance says you actually used, any item whose margin has slipped, and which contract renews next. Below is a piece of a sample month for XYZ Pizza.
XYZ Pizza Company
Pittsburgh, PA · Illustrative sample
| Item | Oct-25 | Jul-26 | % chg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block mozzarella Sysco Pittsburgh · $/lb | $1.42 | $1.63 | +14.8% |
| Extra virgin olive oil Greco & Sons · $/gal | $32.00 | $39.90 | +24.7% |
| San Marzano tomatoes Greco & Sons · $/#10 can | $8.20 | $9.15 | +11.6% |
| Pizza boxes, 16" Performance Foodservice · $/100 | $38.00 | $40.30 | +6.1% |
Sample figures on my demo shop. The distributors are real Pittsburgh houses, but the prices above are illustrative, not quotes — your report tracks the prices on your invoices, from your own vendors.
Open the renewal calendar — all 5 contracts, with days left Insurance, workers’ comp, the POS contract, the cooler service, the lease. One of them renews in 20 days.
Nobody reads invoices line by line at 11 p.m. That’s the job.
On the left is a piece of a sample Kitchen Intelligence Report — XYZ Pizza, my made-up demo shop. It’s the monthly output of the watch: what moved, what it costs you at your volume, and what needs a decision before it renews itself.
- Rising-cost watch. Every vendor invoice feeds a price history — so a tariff, a cheese swing, or a quiet nickel on boxes shows up the week it happens, with a dollar figure on it.
- A flag when an item slips. Cheese and packaging link straight to the price feed, so when a tracked item’s margin crosses the line you hear about it — with the options, only one of which is touching your menu board.
- No-surprise renewals. Insurance, the POS contract, the cooler service — flagged before they auto-renew at a new rate, not after you’ve paid it.
“The olive oil line is why this report exists. A $5.30-a-gallon jump doesn’t announce itself — it just sits on an invoice you paid at midnight. At three gallons a week that’s $825 a year, from one line, on one bill. The watch reads every line, every month, so you don’t have to.”
See a full sample month. No email, no form.
The complete Kitchen Intelligence Report for XYZ (my sample demo shop) — every tracked item, the full renewal calendar, and the costed menu. Open it right now; nothing to fill in and no call required.
How much cheese is walking out the door?
The shops that run tightest count cheese every night and chase any variance over 2%. You don’t have to — the answer is already sitting in your invoices and your register. Rough numbers are fine.
Straight arithmetic on what you buy versus what your recipe says. It won’t be exact — a big delivery at month end throws one month off, and a heavy hoagie month shifts the mix. Over a quarter it settles down. On your real invoices I run it properly, item by item.
Hi, I'm Mark Pagano. I work the numbers for pizza shops.
I grew up in a family food business. My family practically lived in that shop, and a lot of my best memories are from behind that counter. I also remember the numbers only reaching us every so often, well after the fact — too late to act on, and if I’m honest, we wouldn’t have known what to do with them anyway. That’s why I like working with family-owned places, and why I don’t just hand you the numbers — I tell you what they mean and what to do about them.
Then I spent 30+ years as a corporate controller — the person who runs the numbers inside larger companies. The businesses I could help most, and enjoyed most, were the local pizza places. Margins are tight, the cash moves fast, and the gap between a good year and a hard one usually comes down to five numbers nobody's watching.
I'm not a big firm or an app. You get one person keeping the whole admin side straight — full-charge books, payroll, bills, sales tax — and reading the numbers back to you in plain English, alongside your CPA.
This is what you get from me every month
Three levels, and the invoice watch runs under all of them — a controller keeping your shop’s numbers straight and reading them back to you. What changes as you move up is how much paperwork comes off your plate and how closely the numbers get watched: Intelligence reads your numbers and your invoices without touching your books, Essentials takes the books off you, and Full Service runs the whole back office. Three starting points — or build your own.
Intelligence
Your books stay exactly where they are and your bookkeeper keeps their job. You send me the invoices; I check what your suppliers are charging you, read your numbers against the benchmarks, and tell you every month what changed and what it cost you.
- Every invoice price tracked — what moved, and what it costs you a month and a year
- Cheese & food variance — what you bought against what you should have used
- Renewals flagged before they roll over at a new rate
- The monthly Kitchen Intelligence Report
- Food cost, labor and what you keep — read off your own P&L, against the benchmarks
Essentials
Your books move to me — sales, bank, cards and bills recorded, reconciled and closed every month. Everything in Intelligence keeps running underneath, now off your real numbers instead of a statement you hand me.
- Everything in Intelligence, plus:
- Books closed every month — P&L and balance sheet, reconciled
- Sales per labor hour, by day of the week
- The monthly Financial Health Review — what you made, what it cost you, what’s slipping
- A note from me on what changed
Full Service
Full-charge financial operations — I run it, not just report it back. On paper, in your inbox, read it when you’ve got five minutes.
- Everything in Essentials, plus:
- Payroll, managed — run through your provider, checked against your books every month
- Bill-pay (AP), managed — bills come in, I code them, you tap approve, I pay it
- Sales tax — tracked across every channel, the exact number to file
- The Channel Breakdown — dine-in, carryout, delivery and catering, and what the apps keep
Every shop gets closed on its own, and then you get the picture across all of them. Its own P&L, its own five numbers, its own invoice watch — plus the combined view, and the one page that puts your shops side by side so you can see which one is carrying the others.
Separate entities and separate sales-tax filings are normal, not an upcharge conversation. If your shops buy from the same distributor, the invoice watch gets sharper with each one — I can see the same item priced two different ways at two of your own stores.
What it costs. Each shop is quoted on its own, and the second one costs less than the first — the setup work only happens once. Nothing about that changes what the first shop pays.
And the question you should be asking: I take on a handful of shops at a time, on purpose, so you get real attention instead of a queue position. That also means I’ll tell you straight if I don’t have room for all of yours. Your books live in your accounts, under your logins, closed and documented every month — so if I get hit by a bus, nothing about your numbers is trapped with me.
Build your own.
Take a piece of Full Service onto an Essentials base, or drop anything you’ll never use. Tell me what you want watched and what you don’t — I scope it to your shop and quote it off the review.
Book a free call →Two ways to begin — you’ll do one, not both.
Whichever fits your shop, it ends the same way: I quote your monthly number afterward, and nobody pays for help they didn’t ask for.
Cleanup & catch-up first
Quoted flat before any work starts. Doing that work myself is how I see the shop — how much time it really takes and where the leaks are — so your monthly price comes straight out of it.
Doing the rebuild is the scoping — I’m inside your numbers either way, so there’s nothing extra to buy on this route.
No review, no $400. Books behind is the usual starting line.
Book a free call →The Financial Health Review
Nothing to clean up, so the Review is how I see your shop — $400 flat, and it sets your scope and your price. It credits back toward month one, so going monthly within 30 days makes it the first of the plan, not a charge on top.
Why the tidy shop pays and the messy one doesn’t: if your books are behind, rebuilding them is how I see your shop — I’m already inside the numbers, so the scoping comes free with the work. Current books have nothing to rebuild, so the Review is the only way I can look properly. It isn’t a penalty for being organised, and it credits straight back the moment you go monthly.
Essentials and Full Service both get that Review every month. Intelligence gets the same read off your own P&L.
See what it looks like →And at every level: when something’s slipping, I call. You run the shop — I keep an eye on the numbers and flag it early.
Not everything's monthly.
Some things aren't monthly — they come up when they come up. Because I'm already in your books, I can turn these around fast, priced per job. Any level can add one, and so can a shop that isn't on a plan at all.
Shoebox → current
Behind on the books? Most shops that need help are. Watch the cleanup: months reconciled one at a time, until everything’s current — flat quote before it starts.
Any tier can add these. Already on monthly? They're faster and cheaper — the books are already current.
Not sure which level fits?
That’s the call. Twenty minutes, no obligation — I’ll tell you straight whether monthly makes sense for a shop your size, or whether you’re fine as you are.
Quoted to your shop, after the review · Month-to-month, cancel anytime · No contract, no surprises
One shop for your whole admin side. Built for pizza.
Right now it's a bookkeeper here, a payroll service there, bills you chase yourself, and nobody watching what your suppliers are charging you. I'm one shop that handles all of it — accounting, payroll, payables, and the pizza-specific work a generalist never touches — and every month I tell you, in plain dollars, where it's going.
↓ Play with the numbers below — it's your shop, set the sliders to match
How every number here is calculated
The tools — fixed prices. QuickBooks Online $38 / $75 / $115 a month (most shops need Plus); Gusto payroll $49 base + $6–$12/employee (we model ~$8); BILL (Bill.com) $49/user; DAVO by Avalara $57.99/mo per location. (Intuit, Gusto, BILL, DAVO — 2025)
Your bookkeeper — you enter it. One part-time bookkeeper usually keeps the books, pays the bills and runs payroll — one wage, not three fees. Part-timers run ~$25–$45/hr. (NerdWallet, 2025)
Turning a tool off adds hours. The software isn’t optional work — it’s automated work. Switch a tool off and someone keys that job by hand, so the time line climbs, and it’s worse with no accounting software to post into. Dropping tools almost always adds more in hours than it saves in subscriptions.
Your own time — the hours you still spend even with help, valued at your rate; it jumps if you have no bookkeeper. The yearly figure is true monthly × 12 — your real spend, not a Forte quote.
“Verified every month” is a line any bookkeeper can put on a website. This is what it looks like when it’s true.
The month, verified — watch it catch the error
Your sales, your deposits, and your books have to agree. A plain bookkeeper closes and hopes. Forte proves it — and holds the month if a number’s off. Press the button.
Straight answers, no fine print
If your question isn't here, call or email. You'll get me, not a phone tree.
I’m a controller who does the full-charge bookkeeping — books, payroll, bills, and sales tax, closed and proven every month — and then reads the numbers back to you. A plain bookkeeper records the past. Taxes stay with your CPA.
Free call first. Then one of two ways in — you do one, never both.
Books behind: cleanup, quoted flat before I start. No review, nothing else to buy. Books current: the Financial Health Review, $400 flat, credited back toward month one if you go monthly within 30 days.
Either route ends the same way: I quote your monthly number afterward, built off your actual books rather than a sticker that wasn’t made for your shop. Monthly plans come in three levels — Intelligence if you’re keeping your own books, then Essentials and Full Service.
One person — me. Your books, bank statements, and payroll are never shared, never sold, never touched by junior staff or a call center. Everything moves through encrypted, reputable tools — your own accounting software and a secure shared drive with two-factor login, not loose email attachments — and it all lives in your accounts: you grant access, and you can revoke it anytime. Month-to-month, cancel whenever, and every month's work is documented and yours to keep.
Intelligence leaves your books exactly where they are — you keep your bookkeeper, send me the invoices, and I watch what your suppliers charge and read your numbers each month. Essentials takes the books off you: closed monthly, plus the monthly Financial Health Review. Full Service adds the rest — payroll, bills and sales tax run from my desk on top of all of it. The vendor watch runs under all three. You pick the level; I quote it after the review or the cleanup.
No new system for you to learn — and no system required to start. However your records show up, they work. A POS export, a stack of statements, orders written on tickets, a drawer of receipts — take a picture, forward the email, drop it in a shared folder, or hand me the stack. Sorting it is my job, not yours. No POS and no software is not a problem here — it's just another starting point. Behind the scenes I keep your books in standard accounting software your CPA already works with, but that's my side of the desk. You don't run software; you just get the monthly read.
Not at all — cash and no-POS shops are exactly who this is built for. Write orders on tickets and ring them into a register? Give me the daily totals (a photo of the Z-tape is enough) and I capture each day's sales, tax, and cash-vs-card, and reconcile it to what actually hit the bank — flagging any day that's short. No new POS, no changing how you operate: the same clean books and monthly read as a shop running Toast.
Not at all — messy books are half the reason owners call me. I do the cleanup myself: we get your books current, reconciled, and trustworthy first, with a flat quote before I start. A monthly plan keeps them clear from there. See exactly how cleanup works →
Two reports, every month. The Financial Health Review — your books closed and tied out, your statements (P&L and balance sheet), your five numbers against the benchmarks, and a note from me on what changed and what to watch. And the Kitchen Intelligence Report — the cost side: what moved on your invoices and what it runs you a year, what your food variance says you actually used, any item whose margin has slipped, and which contract renews next. Both come with Essentials and with Full Service. Full Service adds the work itself on top — payroll managed, bills paid, sales tax filed. On paper and in your inbox. See the Sample section above for what it looks like.
No. It's month-to-month, cancel anytime. I'd rather earn it every month than trap you in a contract.
No. That's your CPA's job, and I work hand-in-hand with whoever files your return. I keep your numbers clear and current so tax time is easy. No CPA yet? I can point you to one who knows restaurants.
I'm local to Greater Pittsburgh and I'll come to your shop — and I'll keep coming when you need me to. If you'd rather hand me a stack of paper across the counter than upload it, that works. Most months it runs by email and the occasional call, because that's easier for both of us. But there's a real person twenty minutes up the road, not a support ticket at a software company three states away. You'll always deal with me directly — there is nobody else to be handed to.
Both. Every DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Slice payout gets pulled apart — gross sales, commission, ad fees, refunds — and tied to the deposit, so you finally see what each app really costs. On sales tax, I track what you collected across every channel, separate out what the delivery apps already remit for you, and hand you the exact number to file — so you're not paying twice or guessing.
Yes — that’s Intelligence, $275 a month. You keep your bookkeeper; I take your invoices and your P&L and give you the vendor watch, your numbers against the benchmarks, and the monthly Kitchen Intelligence Report — without your books moving anywhere. One catch: a read is only as good as the books under it, so if yours are behind we’d do a cleanup first, quoted flat up front.
Still weighing it up?
Twenty minutes on the phone answers more than another hour of reading. Free, no pitch, and you’ll get me — not a phone tree.
It doesn’t leave all at once. It leaks.
Cheese is about 40% of what a pizza costs you to make — and the one price that creeps up quietly between menu changes. A few cents a pound doesn’t feel like anything. Multiply it by everything you buy, and it’s real money. Watching for that is the job.
- Vendor prices creeping up
- Menu priced below cost
- Coupons that don’t pay off
- Voids & comps adding up
- Third-party delivery fees
- Catering going untracked
↓ The 30-second gut-check — five leaks, one tool. Slide in what your shop runs; rough is fine.
Six quick gut-checks — tap any that sound like your shop
Slide in your numbers. Rough is fine. The reveal below shows what you keep at these numbers and what one point of food cost is worth.
That's a creep of 35¢ a pound.
That’s the gut-check on one ingredient. See what watching it for real looks like →
The delivery-fee bleed
The apps never deposit what the orders rang up. Pick your plan and slide your volume to see what commission and ads take — and what actually lands.
How these numbers work
Delivery apps (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) charge a marketplace commission by plan — 15% Basic, 25% Plus, 30% Premier — and card processing is included in that commission, not billed on top. (DoorDash, 2025)
Ads / sponsored listings are optional and only apply if you opt in — 0% to ~15%+ of the sales they drive. Slide it to your reality.
One more, not on the bar: the apps also collect and remit the sales tax on marketplace orders, so your deposit is net of that too. Forte separates it out so you never pay it twice — and pulls every payout apart so you see what each app actually costs.
Can you answer these five about your own shop?
One page, about two minutes. Food cost, labor, the two together (prime cost), what the apps keep, and what you actually take home. Most owners hit two or three they’re not sure of — that’s the useful part. Enter your email and it opens right away.
What Forte tracks and catches for a shop like yours — illustrative, not client results
How this works
Start with a free call. If it's a fit, the review shows you exactly where you stand. Books behind or a mess? Cleanup comes first — quoted flat before I start. Monthly is where it usually goes from there.
The intro call
A quick, no-pressure call to see if Forte's a fit for your shop. I'll point you to the one or two numbers worth a closer look — and we'll settle one thing: whether your books are current enough to read, or need cleaning up first. That decides which route you take — not how much you spend. No charge, no obligation.
Most shops start hereCleanup & catch-up first, quoted flat before any work starts. It isn’t a problem — it’s the starting line. Doing the cleanup myself is how I see the shop: how much time it really takes and where the leaks are. Your monthly price comes straight out of that work. No review, no $400.
Nothing to clean up, so the Financial Health Review is how I see your shop — $400 flat, and it sets your scope and your price. It credits back toward month one, so if you go monthly within 30 days it isn’t a charge on top of the plan — it’s the first of it.
The Financial Health Review
A fixed-price look at your existing numbers. You get a three-statement snapshot, your five numbers benchmarked against where a healthy pizza shop sits, and the top five findings, each with a real dollar figure on it. You get the written report and a walkthrough of it.
A monthly plan
The whole admin side, run at the level you want — books, payroll, bills and sales tax closed every month, your five numbers, and the monthly Financial Health Review. Then the part a generalist never touches: every ingredient price tracked off your invoices as it moves, what each menu item actually earns once it does, and every contract flagged before it renews. Month-to-month. Cancel anytime.
The $400 review is credited toward your first month if you go monthly within 30 days.
Find out what your shop is really making.
“My promise to you: the first call is free, and you only pay once we both agree it's worth doing. Nothing starts until you say go.”
Book a free call. We'll see if Forte's a fit and what your numbers might be telling you. It's free, and there's no pitch.
You'll always reach me, not a front desk. If I miss you, I call back same day.
I'll be in touch within one business day to set up your free call.
Pizza shop bookkeeping and controller oversight for shops across Greater Pittsburgh. Based in Freeport in the Allegheny Valley — minutes from Natrona Heights, Tarentum, New Kensington, Lower Burrell, Brackenridge, Cheswick and Springdale — and wherever your shop is, I come to you.
Full-service financial operations & full-charge bookkeeping for pizza shops and restaurants — books, payroll, bills, sales tax, and the numbers read back to you. Greater Pittsburgh, PA.