Services / Restaurant Bookkeeping
Outsourced restaurant bookkeeping services
For books that are six weeks behind with the invoices in a shoebox, and for groups that simply want the close to land on time. Daily sales imported, invoices captured and coded, every account reconciled, and a closed set of books on a date you can plan around — run by a named accountant who knows what a comp is and why it matters.
At a glance
- Books closed
- By day 10, every period, on your calendar
- Reconciled
- Bank, merchant settlement, POS, delivery platforms
- Invoices
- Captured, coded and approved through your AP workflow
- You see
- Weekly flash Tuesday, closed P&L day 10
Why a general bookkeeper struggles
Restaurant books break in specific places
A competent general bookkeeper can produce a technically correct set of restaurant books that tells an operator nothing useful. These are the differences.
Daily sales, not monthly invoices
Most businesses book a handful of large transactions. A restaurant generates hundreds of small ones every day across cash, card, gift card and three delivery platforms — each settling on a different schedule.
The deposit never matches the sale
Gross sales, platform commission, promotional discounts, chargebacks and the processor's fee all sit between the ticket and the money landing. Reconciling to the deposit alone hides all of it.
Inventory moves every day
Food and beverage inventory has to be counted and valued on the period boundary or cost of sales is fiction. A bookkeeper who skips inventory produces a P&L that swings wildly for no visible reason.
Comps and voids are not discounts
They need separate treatment and separate reporting, because they are where losses hide. Netting them into sales makes theft and over-comping invisible.
Tips are not revenue
Tips pass through; service charges are wages. Coding them the same way is one of the most common and most expensive errors in restaurant books.
The calendar is not a month
Four-week periods or 4-4-5 quarters, so a five-Saturday month does not read as growth. Closing on calendar months makes every comparison misleading.
Scope
What we actually do each period
Daily sales and deposits
POS imported and reconciled to bank and merchant settlement, including every delivery platform, with variances investigated rather than plugged.
Invoice capture and coding
Vendor invoices captured, coded to the chart of accounts by category, and routed through approval before payment.
Reconciliations
Bank, credit card, merchant, gift card, house accounts and intercompany, every period without exception.
Inventory and cost of sales
Period-end counts valued and posted, theoretical usage compared to actual, variance reported by category.
Accruals and prepaid
Rent, insurance, utilities and vendor accruals so each period carries its own costs rather than whichever invoices happened to arrive.
Period close and reporting
Closed P&L and balance sheet by day 10, with written variance commentary — not a file drop.
The comparison operators actually make
Outsourced against in-house
| In-house bookkeeper | Outsourced to us | |
|---|---|---|
| Cover when they are away | The close waits | A team, so nothing stops |
| Hospitality experience | Whatever you managed to hire | Minimum five years, every person |
| Senior review | Rare below a controller salary | Included — a controller reviews the close |
| Systems and licenses | Yours to buy and maintain | Ours |
| Segregation of duties | Hard with one person | Structural — different people, different functions |
| Scales to a second location | Another hire | Scope change |
The honest counterpoint: an in-house person is in the building, knows your staff, and can chase a vendor down the hall. If that proximity matters more to you than cover and senior review, in-house is the right answer and we will say so.
Pricing
What restaurant bookkeeping services cost, and what moves the fee
A fixed monthly fee, quoted after scoping. No hourly billing, and the number is agreed before any work starts. We do not publish a menu price, because a figure quoted without seeing your operation is a guess. These are the things that actually move it:
| What moves the fee | Why it matters in a restaurant |
|---|---|
| Entities and locations | Each entity needs its own reconciliations and close; a group also needs intercompany and a consolidated view. |
| Transaction volume and sales channels | Every delivery platform, gift card program and house account is another settlement stream to reconcile to the deposit. |
| Which functions we run | Bookkeeping alone, or also AP, inventory valuation and period reporting. |
| Whether payroll is included | Tipped payroll, tip credit and Form 8027 work add scope. See restaurant payroll. |
| The state of your current books | Cleanup of prior periods is scoped and quoted separately, so you decide how far back to go. |
Whoever you hire, insist on a fixed monthly fee against a written scope with the exclusions listed, rather than hourly billing against an open scope. More on that in questions to ask a restaurant accountant.
What clean books make possible
From three locations to nine
A multi-unit restaurant group came to us at three locations. We built a budget and a set of bank-ready financial statements. That package secured a credit line at a good rate, and the group has since grown to nine locations.
The point is not the bookkeeping for its own sake. A lender reads a closed, reconciled P&L and balance sheet very differently from a shoebox. If growth is the plan, the books are part of the financing, which is where CFO and controller support picks up.
Common questions
Before you ask
Our books are a mess. Is that a problem?
Common, and not a disqualifier. Cleanup is scoped and quoted separately from the ongoing service, so you decide how far back to go rather than being billed into it. See switching your books.
Do we have to change systems?
No. We work in QuickBooks, Restaurant365, Compeat, PlateIQ, XtraChef and a range of POS and payroll platforms, and can accommodate other ERP environments.
Who actually touches our books?
A named accountant who runs your account day to day, with a controller reviewing the close. Not a rotating pool, and not offshore — all work is completed in our US offices.
Can you handle several entities?
Yes. Separate entities per location with intercompany eliminations and a consolidated group view. See franchise and multi-unit.
What do restaurant bookkeeping services cost?
A fixed monthly fee, quoted after scoping, with no hourly billing. It is driven by entity and location count, transaction volume, which functions we run, whether payroll is included, and the state of your current books. Cleanup of prior periods is quoted separately.
What is the difference between restaurant bookkeeping and restaurant accounting?
Bookkeeping is the recording and reconciliation layer: sales, deposits, invoices, inventory and the period close. Restaurant accounting sits on top of it: prime cost by unit, variance analysis, multi-entity reporting and the decisions that follow. Most operators need both, and the second is only as good as the first. See restaurant accounting services.
Do you only work with New York restaurants?
No. We work with restaurant operators across the United States. New York operators also get coverage of the state and city rules that apply to them. See New York restaurant accounting.
Further reading
Written for operators, not for search engines
Reference
Food cost percentage
Why usage and not purchases, and the six things that corrupt the calculation.
Reference
Prime cost
COGS plus total labor — including the salaried management most operators leave out.
Reference
Form 8027
Who has to file, and the coding errors that produce an allocation nobody owed.
Tying point-of-sale gross sales to the sales tax return is its own procedure — see restaurant sales tax reconciliation, with the NYC sales tax calculator for a single check. New York operators: see what changes under the Part 146 wage order. Moving from another firm? Start with the accountant handover pack. New to how the mechanics fit together? Start with how restaurant accounting actually works.
Operating in New York? See the NYC restaurant tax guide and New York restaurant accounting.
Bring your last P&L and your last bank reconciliation.
Twenty minutes. We will tell you what we would fix first.