Industry
Bookkeeping for Rhode Island restaurants
Daily sales recorded as sales rather than as whatever the bank deposited, prime cost you can trust, and delivery app commissions that actually appear in the numbers.
Why restaurant books go wrong
A restaurant generates more transactions before lunch than most small businesses do in a week, and almost none of them arrive as a clean entry. Sales come from a point of sale system, cash comes from a drawer, card money arrives days later net of fees, delivery apps pay whenever they feel like it, and food invoices turn up in a pile.
The result is books that reconcile to the bank but describe a business nobody recognises.
Daily sales, recorded as sales
The single most common error is treating the bank deposit as the sale. It is not. The deposit is what survived after card processing fees, chargebacks, tips paid out and app commissions.
Recorded properly, a day's trading becomes one entry that captures gross sales, tax collected, tips, comps, discounts, the cash counted, and the card settlement expected. That entry is what lets you compare Tuesday to Tuesday and see a problem before the quarter ends.
Delivery apps are where the money hides. DoorDash and Uber Eats pay you net of a commission that is often twenty to thirty percent. If the deposit is booked as revenue, your sales are understated and the commission never appears as a cost at all. You cannot tell whether delivery is profitable, because the number that would tell you was never recorded.
Prime cost, which is the number that matters
Food and beverage cost plus labour. It is the figure restaurant operators live by, and it is only as good as the categorisation behind it. If the produce delivery is coded to general supplies and the kitchen wages sit in the same account as the front of house, the number is meaningless.
- Food, beverage and alcohol separated, because they carry different margins and different rules
- Kitchen and front of house labour split, so you can see which side is drifting
- Paper, cleaning and smallwares kept out of food cost, where they quietly inflate it
- Comps, voids and staff meals tracked, not buried
Tips are a liability, not income
Tips collected on cards belong to staff. Between the moment the customer pays and the moment the money reaches the person who earned it, it sits in your bank account and it is not yours. Booked as revenue it inflates sales and then vanishes as an expense, and neither number is true.
Tips get recorded as what they are: money held on behalf of someone else, cleared when it is paid out.
Gift cards, deposits and private events
A gift card sold is not a sale. It is a promise to feed someone later, and it stays a liability until it is redeemed. The same is true of deposits on private parties and catering. Counting them as revenue when the money arrives produces a strong month followed by a weak one, and a tax bill on profit that was never profit.
Sales tax and the meals tax
Rhode Island applies a meals and beverage tax on prepared food on top of state sales tax. Both are money you collect for the state and hold. In the books they are liabilities, not income, and they need to be tracked separately so what you remit matches what you took.
I record and reconcile it. What gets filed, and when, is your CPA's call.
Inventory, without making it a second job
Full perpetual inventory is more than most independent restaurants can sustain. A periodic count at month end, recorded properly, gets you ninety percent of the value for a fraction of the effort, and it is what turns a food cost percentage from a guess into a measurement.
Who this suits
Independent restaurants, cafes, bars, pizzerias, food trucks, bakeries and caterers. Single location or a small group. If you are trying to work out why a busy month did not leave anything behind, that is the problem this fixes.
Common questions
Do you handle tip reporting?
I record tips correctly in the books and keep the numbers your payroll provider and your CPA need. I do not run payroll myself, so the filing side sits with whoever does.
We use Toast. Does that work?
Yes. Toast, Square, Clover and the others all export in a form that can be brought into QuickBooks properly. The work is in mapping it once, correctly, so daily sales land as sales and not as a lump deposit.
Our delivery apps make no sense on the bank statement. Can that be fixed?
Yes, and it is the most common thing I fix in restaurant books. The deposit you see is net of commission. Recorded as-is it understates both your sales and your costs, which makes every margin you calculate wrong.
Where to next
Busy month, nothing left over?
That gap is almost always in how sales and costs are being recorded. Tell me what point of sale you run and I will tell you what I would look at.
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