Restaurants & cafés
Bookkeeping for restaurants, cafés and food trucks
A restaurant generates more transactions before lunch than most businesses see in a week. The books either keep up daily or they never catch up at all.
Restaurant bookkeeping lives or dies on the daily sales entry. The point of sale system knows what was sold, what was comped, what was taken in cash and what was charged. If that summary is not recorded every day, the deposits in the bank stop matching anything and the month becomes a reconstruction project.
The second half is cost. Food and labor together decide whether a busy month was a profitable one, and both move week to week. Books that report them monthly, against sales, turn a gut feeling about the menu into a number.
Where the books go wrong
What we look at first
Deposits that do not match sales
Card settlements arrive net of fees, a day or two late, batched across shifts. Recording the deposit as the day's sales understates revenue and hides the processing cost entirely.Tips treated as income
Tips collected on cards pass through the business on their way to staff. They belong in a liability account until they are paid out, not in the sales figure.Food cost that nobody can calculate
Supplier invoices coded to a single 'Supplies' account make food cost impossible to read. Split food, beverage, alcohol and paper goods and the percentage becomes something you can manage.Third-party delivery
Delivery platforms remit net of commission, and the commission is often a fifth of the order. Booking only the deposit makes the sales line look small and the cost line look nonexistent.
What we do each month
- Daily sales summaries from the point of sale recorded to the right revenue categories
- Card settlements and processing fees reconciled to the deposits that actually landed
- Tips tracked through a liability account from collection to payout
- Supplier invoices split into food, beverage, alcohol and paper
- Delivery platform statements recorded gross, with commission shown as a cost
- Sales tax collected recorded as a liability, with the period's figures ready for your tax preparer
Setting up QuickBooks for it
The daily sales entry is the backbone: one journal or sales receipt per day that records gross sales by category, comps and discounts, sales tax collected, tips, and the tender split, so the deposit clears against it.
Separate revenue accounts for food, beverage, alcohol and delivery keep the mix visible without extra work at month end.
Where the point of sale integrates cleanly with QuickBooks Online, we set it up and check the first weeks closely. Where it does not, a disciplined manual entry is more reliable than a half-working sync.
Carey is a QuickBooks Online Advanced ProAdvisor, so a file can be set up, cleaned up or migrated as part of the same engagement — see QuickBooks services.
Reporting
The numbers worth watching
Food and beverage cost percentage
Cost of goods against the sales they produced, tracked monthly. Menu pricing conversations start here.Labor as a share of sales
Wages, payroll taxes and benefits against revenue, so a schedule change shows up as a number rather than a feeling.Prime cost
Food plus labor together — the figure most operators watch, because between them they take most of the margin.
Questions we are asked
Do you work with restaurant point of sale systems?
Yes. The usual approach is to record a daily sales summary from your point of sale into QuickBooks, either through an integration where one works well or by a standard daily entry where it does not. Either way the aim is the same: the deposits reconcile and the sales categories mean something.
Can you run our payroll?
We handle payroll records and coordinate with your payroll provider so wages, taxes and tips are recorded correctly in the books. Payroll tax filings themselves stay with your provider or your tax preparer.
Start with a conversation
Let's look at your books together
Tell us about your church or business and where your bookkeeping stands. Carey will follow up to arrange a consultation, and you'll receive a written scope before any work begins.