Restaurant bookkeeping: the document checklist

A restaurant's revenue arrives in a dozen streams and lands in the bank days later, netted of fees, with tips and sales tax mixed in. The POS knows the truth; the bank feed does not. So restaurant bookkeeping is mostly the discipline of getting the daily sales summary every day and reconciling everything else to it.

The second complication is timing. Refunds, voids and adjustments post days after the sale, which is why a daily journal entry pushed automatically from the POS so often stops matching by the end of the month.

Request every month

Daily sales summaries should arrive daily or weekly — chasing a month of them at once is how restaurant closes end up two weeks late.

• Daily sales summary / Z report from the POS for every day and every location
• POS period reports: gross sales, discounts, comps, voids, refunds, sales tax collected
• Tip reports — cash tips, charged tips, tip-outs and any tip pooling detail
• Merchant processor statements showing gross settlement and fees separately
• Third-party delivery payout reports (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) with commission detail
• Gift card sales and redemptions for the period
• Bank statements for every account, including any tip or payroll account
• Credit card statements for owner and manager cards
• Vendor invoices — food, beverage, paper and supplies, ideally split by category
• Payroll reports including tip credit, overtime and any service charge distribution
• Rent, utility and equipment lease invoices
• Inventory counts if the client takes them (opening and closing)

Request quarterly or annually

• Quarterly: sales tax filings and payment confirmations, reconciled to POS tax collected.
• Quarterly: payroll tax filings, and tip credit reporting where applicable.
• Annually: liquor licence, health permit and insurance renewals.
• Annually: equipment purchases and leasehold improvements with invoices, for the depreciation schedule.
• Annually: W-9s for any contractors — musicians, cleaners, maintenance.

Ask before you onboard

These are the questions that decide whether you have priced the engagement correctly. Ask them on the first call, not in month three.

• Which POS system, and can I get read-only reporting access?
• Is a daily sales journal entry being pushed to the ledger automatically, and by which tool?
• How many locations, and do they share a bank account or run separately?
• Which delivery platforms, and at what commission?
• How are tips handled — pooled, tipped out, paid through payroll or in cash?
• Are there service charges, and are they treated as revenue or as tips?
• Who runs payroll, and are tip credits being applied?
• Do you take physical inventory, and how often?

Traps that catch bookkeepers new to restaurants

Late POS activity breaking the daily entry. A refund issued three days after the sale, or an order adjusted after close, arrives after the daily journal entry has already posted. If you use an automated POS-to-ledger tool, build a monthly review step to catch these — this is the single most common restaurant reconciliation complaint.

Booking delivery payouts as revenue. A delivery platform deposit is net of commission, marketing fees and sometimes refunds. Gross sales belong in revenue and the commission belongs in expense — otherwise you understate both, and the client's food cost percentage looks wrong.

Tips running through revenue. Charged tips collected on behalf of staff are a liability until paid out, not income. Mixing them into sales inflates revenue and distorts every ratio the owner cares about.

Gift cards recognised at sale. A gift card sale is deferred revenue until redeemed. Restaurants sell a lot of them in December, which makes this a year-end problem specifically.

Small unidentified POS variances. Getting a POS reconciliation to exactly zero every month is not always realistic. Agree an immateriality threshold with the client up front and a standard treatment for what falls under it, so you are not spending three hours hunting $40.