Services / Restaurant Bookkeeping
Your books are six weeks behind and the invoices are in a shoebox.
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 licences | 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.
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.
Bring your last P&L and your last bank reconciliation.
Twenty minutes. We will tell you what we would fix first.