Restaurant accounting that handles tips, food cost, and the close.
Tip pooling, food cost percentage, daily sales reconciliation, and the payroll tax credits most restaurants leave on the table. Built for Denver cafés, restaurants, and quick-service.
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Restaurant accounting is detail-heavy in ways no other small business comes close to. Daily POS imports. Tips pooled across roles and shifts. Food cost broken into produce, protein, dairy, dry goods, beverage. Payroll that has to handle hourly servers with declared tips, kitchen staff on hourly, and managers on salary — sometimes all in the same week. Get any of it wrong and the P&L stops being useful.
We work with quick-service cafés, full-service restaurants, breweries with food, and food trucks. The framework adjusts to your concept but the bones are the same: daily reconciliation, tight COGS by category, and payroll that handles tipped employees correctly.
What we handle for restaurants
- Daily POS reconciliation from Toast, Square, Clover, or Lightspeed — we tie out gross sales, comps, voids, taxes, and tips daily.
- COGS by category — food cost split into produce, protein, dairy, dry, paper, beverage. Liquor cost separated from food cost.
- Tip pool accounting with full compliance under the FLSA tip pooling rules and Colorado-specific tipped-wage handling.
- FICA Tip Credit (Form 8846) — the credit most restaurants forget to claim.
- Payroll for tipped employees with declared tips, tip allocation, and 8027 reporting if applicable.
- Sales tax filing — Colorado state, county, and city (Denver and metro have layered local taxes).
- Inventory tracking for restaurants carrying meaningful inventory.
- Quarterly tax planning built around restaurant-specific deductions.
Software we work in for restaurants
- Toast + QuickBooks Online — most common combo, with daily auto-sync.
- Square for Restaurants + QBO — for smaller cafés and quick-service.
- Restaurant365 — for multi-location restaurants ($2M+ in revenue per location).
- Gusto Payroll — handles tipped employees correctly when configured properly.
Pricing
| Concept | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Coffee shop / café, single location | $500 – $800 |
| Full-service restaurant, single location | $700 – $1,400 |
| Multi-location or brewery with food | $1,500 – $3,500 |
Restaurants pay FICA on declared tips just like wages — but the IRS gives you a credit for the employer portion (Form 8846). A 12-employee restaurant with $180K in declared tips can recover roughly $13,800 a year. Most of our restaurant clients had never claimed this credit before we onboarded them.
If you are a coffee shop with under 10 staff, daily POS reconciliation can be weekly — but tip handling still has to be exact.
If you run full-service with multiple servers and a tip pool, you need monthly bookkeeping with tip-pool reconciliation built in.
If you run multi-location, Restaurant365 plus monthly close is the right setup. Anything else gets messy.
Daily reconciliation, real food cost, and the tip credit you are probably missing.
From $500/month for a single location. We know Toast, Square, R365 — and the tax credits most firms overlook.
Frequently asked questions
How do you handle tip pooling?
We track each pool by shift and role, allocate per the pool agreement, and run payroll with the correct declared-tip amounts on each paycheck. The pool reconciliation runs at month-end so you know exactly what was distributed and to whom.
What is the FICA Tip Credit?
Form 8846 lets restaurants claim a federal income tax credit equal to the employer FICA paid on tips above the federal minimum wage. It is a real refundable credit — most of our restaurant clients had never claimed it before we onboarded them.
Do you handle Colorado-specific sales tax?
Yes. Denver and most metro cities have home rule sales tax separate from state collection. We file state, county, RTD, and city returns separately and handle the food vs alcohol breakdown each requires.
Can you reconcile my POS daily?
Yes — we set up an automated daily Z-report import from Toast, Square, or Clover into QuickBooks. We reconcile any variances at month-end (tip pool true-ups, comp categorization, refund timing).
What about food cost percentage?
We track food cost as a % of food revenue, split by category (protein, produce, dairy, dry, paper). Industry benchmark is 28–35% for full-service. If you are above 35%, we drill into which category is dragging margin and recommend menu engineering.