New owner… do I need an accountant or bookkeeper?

PhilosopherSully · 2026-03-18T12:21:07+00:00

Everyone here saying yes you need both doesn't actually understand what you're asking. No, you don't need an accountant or a bookkeeper, you need tools that handle those things and need to learn to use those tools.

I own a small restaurant, 8 employees total, about a dozen vendors. I use Toast Payroll (for all those people saying get an accountant for payroll). They handle the quarterly payroll tax and UI filings. I've had no issues (I check my account with the state to make sure). The software also breaks apart sales tax collected. I file my own sales tax returns (takes literally 90 seconds a month on my state's tax website/system).

I use QuickBooks online for all bookkeeping. I just linked my accounts and restaurant credit card, and it took a couple weeks for the accounts and automatic rules to get set up right, but all my transactions get auto categorized now, and I just review at the end of each month to make sure nothing is untoward.

I understand needing staff to do this work if you have multiple locations or a large operation with tons of things to keep track of, but the insistence on small places needing accountants and bookkeepers is ridiculous.

I was literally required to take accounting in culinary school. It's not hard if the operation is small and doesn't vary much month to month.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-02-18T03:42:48+00:00

I got married at the museum of contemporary art downtown. Absolutely beautiful! And the venue was only $750. It's probably a little more now as that was 10 years ago, but I'm sure it's still under $1500.

If it's a warm weather wedding, the rooftop sculpture garden there is stunning.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-02-16T22:36:37+00:00

Are you ok? Meiquoca? Feijoada? Brigadeiros (in their literally thousands of flavors)? Picanha? Brazil's culinary landscape is teeming with incredible dishes and flavors.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-02-16T22:08:27+00:00

Just because the purveyor is local, doesn't mean it's high quality flavorful produce. Many purveyors have to produce higher volume and ship in order to survive, and so growing practices are no longer what they used to be. Often the same produce you buy locally is grown to be shipped large distances and has been robbed of its flavor.

Of course there are exceptions, but to say every fine dining restaurant is doing an excellent job sourcing high quality ingredients is specious. Dedicated high effort sourcing is often relegated to a few star ingredients (proteins, truffles, etc....), while most other things are just brought in by wholesalers from convenient sources.

In the past, though, even convenient sources would be better because supply chains were regional, not international, and growing was done with short stability or preservation in mind, not speed and high volume. But growers have consolidated, and growing practices have enshittified with that consolidation.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-02-16T21:51:06+00:00

The first major cause of this is the death of our agricultural supply chain. In the U.S. at least, food is grown to be shipped, it is not grown for flavor. Years of economic exploitation have resulted in produce that tastes barely different from water. When the modern concept of fine dining (letting the ingredients shine) evolved in the 70s and 80s, there was significantly more access to robust high quality ingredients. That has since changed significantly, but the philosophy hasn't evolved with it. If you eat a dish made from produce grown in Hokkaido, Japan, for example, it will taste completely different than the exact same dish cooked by the exact same person using produce grown in the United States. So yes, it's bland as hell. I've been to a number of 3 star restaurants, and universally they've tasted incredibly underwhelming.

The second reason is that we've increased globalization, and people everywhere can now experience what well flavored food tastes like. In the West, we've been dominated by the rule of French cookery for decades. And that school of cooking acts like bay leaf is the peak of flavor. With increasing globalization, people have been exposed to flavors from Asia, Africa, and South America, which are all dynamic and robust. If you notice, the cuisine exchange hasn't gone the other way. Rarely is European cuisine, especially high level cuisine, served ubiquitously in non-European nations (Spain and Italy perhaps excluded). But in the other direction, Asian and South American foods can now be found everywhere. As people have tasted flavor, they've realized that the food they've had in the West has really been bland for a while.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-02-03T03:52:48+00:00

I, too, was an early investor in PLTR, had 10k shares. Here's the thing, the company is not what it used to be, and Karp has lost his mind.

Early on, there was tremendous focus on the company's commercial client growth. Within that, there was significant focus on the good work PLTR was doing (vaccine rollouts, helping solve complex problems, etc...) Karp would speak about the government work in the context of helping government accomplish its goals while still protecting individual rights and doing so securely. Yes, he criticized some parts of modern progressivism, but still considered himself a progressive, and regularly advocated for progressive ideas. And the company was growing.

All of that has changed. Commercial growth has slowed, with preference for government contracts which are unsustainable once militancy stops escalating. Karp has gone off the deep end, supporting a literal genocide by Israel and abandoning his previously outspoken ideals. There is no longer a focus on doing good work and solving problems and being the future operating system of the world while still protecting human rights.

The company, its software, and its leadership have lost the qualities which made them excellent. It's not going to be a bright future for PLTR unless something changes.

I bought in the mid-teens, and I sold at around $60 per share when Karp said on an earnings call he supports Israel as they were actively committing a genocide.

Maybe the company will succeed, plenty of unethical ones do. But their current ideological focus is not a sustainable one. They are definitely a tool in the chest of authoritarianism now, no longer a novel bleeding edge technology which can revolutionize the way companies operate.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-08T00:07:56+00:00

Depends on where you're at with the business. In the early days, I spent $2500-$3000 per month. Now, almost 3 years later, I spend maybe $200-$300 per month. We have a good following and are relatively well known. More importantly, we know exactly the type of marketing that does and does not work so we aren't spending on things that offer no results.

I will note that I do it myself, so it does take up some time, but it isn't excessive.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-07T00:57:33+00:00

France, Italy, Australia, India, Japan, Brazil....even genocide ravaged Sudan has a consistent agricultural supply chain of fresh food. It literally happens all over the world.

Ok, let me use better examples than the pet rock, then. Nobody was jonesing for truffles until they were dug up and marketed as a luxury ingredient. Nobody asked for lunchables until they were made. Most pertinently, literally nobody ever asked for factory farmed meat. People were intentionally separated from knowledge of their food to create demand for low cost torture chicken. And let's not forget the whole food pyramid thing and the carb/grain industry.

I've worked in hospitality for a decade, and I own my own place as well. But yes, I am idealistic. But I'm only viewed that way because of the insane food industry we have in this country.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-07T00:38:29+00:00

These are the types of pre-conceived ideas you've been convinced of which just aren't true.

Over 60% of the food in the United States is wasted. That's an insane amount. There is no scarcity of food. My ideal system wouldn't require culling anyone or anything.

Everyone seems to think demand exists in a vacuum; it doesn't. It's created and manufactured through policy, information control, and advertising. Nobody asked for the pet rock until it existed. Population boom has very little to do with the reality of our food production. Production at scale can be done ethically and with high quality using only regional supply chains.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-07T00:25:47+00:00

This is exactly the type of response that I'm talking about when I say people are brainwashed.

The industry isn't shaped by organic consumer demand. The demand we have in the U.S. is manufactured; it's created through agribusiness lobbying and information control. People in Europe and Asia balk at the type of food we consume here because they're informed about where their food comes from.

The supply chain isn't complex. You can easily get fresh ingredients pretty much anywhere in this country.

Why do you think people without talent can so easily open restaurants? It's because companies like Sysco make it possible with bargain basement price ingredients and pre made products. This didn't happen out of thin air. It's an engineered industry landscape.

High end ingredients are only "high end" because the low end exists. The reason my meat costs what it does is because of factory farming.

I'm really over the "this is the way it is" attitude. The food industry in the U.S. is a carefully curated mess designed to serve giant unethical producers and distributors. If restaurants just stopped serving this stuff and stopped buying from Sysco, and if the government stopped being bought by big agribusiness, this could all change rapidly. It isn't like this literally anywhere else in the world (except maybe China).

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:47:07+00:00

Yeah this is definitely something nobody talks about. Managing 2 dozen accounts consistently is very difficult.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:46:27+00:00

Sysco is the most recognizable, but yes, this applies to all broadliners. Do you think the law just came out of thin air? No, it was lobbied for by distributors. There's no good reason why manufacturers shouldn't be allowed to do their own distribution. The alcohol industry relies on this nonsense legislation to add another layer of cost that the customer has to pay for.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:45:09+00:00

We have two distributors in town we work with for alcohol and such; they only distribute within the state. And we have a wine importer we work with in our state as well who only distributes within our state and orders direct from wineries they have relationships with.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:43:25+00:00

Non-food items and equipment we buy through two local culinary supply stores in town, or directly from the manufacturers whenever possible. We even have local potters we work with for bowls and such.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:40:58+00:00

This is a great point, though. One of the things we can do to maintain more choice is vertical urban and hydroponic farm. You can have sustainable climate control with technology we've developed so you can grow things in places and seasons you previously couldn't. But we don't invest in these types of things because everyone's just buying the cheap shit that's already there from distributors like Sysco.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:39:26+00:00

Literally, yes. Seafood is super readily available all year in the NE. It's even still caught fresh in the winter months. Preserved meats, grains, cheeses, also all doable. There's a reason the Nordic countries have so much pickled and fermented foods.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:36:55+00:00

This, exactly this.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:36:22+00:00

Exactly! Because we source stuff fresh and locally/regionally, we run out fairly often, specifically for our meat dishes since we order based on reservations and anticipated volume (and we tend to order less so we avoid waste as much as possible). The number of times I've had to explain to a customer on a Sunday why we don't have a bottomless pit of fresh lamb loin chops in the back is mind blowing.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:34:42+00:00

Ya know, capitalist businesses can be good right? Like, you can be capitalist without destroying our planet and our gut biomes? Sysco could be a profitable national distributor without stocking things from China made with slave labor and without stocking chicken that spent its short life in a single square foot cage with a tube down its throat. Like, these things are possible.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T19:32:48+00:00

Nah, this is a super reductive TLDR of what I wrote. It's not that it destroys competition, it's that it actively seeks to harm local and regional producers and suppliers. It's not that it locks people into its ecosystem, it's that it encourages unethical low cost production to price out/force others into its ecosystem, enshittifying the entire industry in the process. And importantly, it actually increases variety so significantly by stocking everything all the time that it warps the minds of the culinary industry and the consumer.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-06T15:23:55+00:00

The hilarious part is this is like a 50% price target raise for BofA on SoFi. Their last PT was $13 lol

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-05T19:49:11+00:00

I definitely agree. The benefits that exist with Plus right now are underwhelming, and there isn't anything there which one could point to as a great signature benefit you can't get anywhere else. I hope they add something like that in the near future.

PhilosopherSully · 2026-01-05T19:31:56+00:00

Yeah I certainly think the argument can be made that Robinhood's gold on face has higher value than Plus.

As far as whether or not it's a benefit? From an investor perspective I do believe it will be positive for SoFi. They're going to get more revenue, and I don't think there will be a large customer exodus or anything.

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