CPA-led books that track prime cost every period, reconcile every POS batch to the bank across the processor and the delivery apps, and handle tips and sales tax correctly, so you manage the two numbers that decide whether the restaurant makes money.
We keep your books current, track prime cost every period, and reconcile every POS batch across the processor and the delivery apps, so you can act on food and labor cost while it still moves and grow on numbers a lender will trust.
What it is. A CPA-led team keeps your books current every month: transactions categorized, every account reconciled, food and labor cost tracked against sales, and financial statements delivered on a fixed date.
Who it is for. Full-service restaurants, quick-service spots, cafes, and multi-unit groups past the do-it-yourself stage: operators who need prime cost, POS reconciliation, and clean compliance to run the business.
What generic bookkeeping misses. Restaurant books have to track food and labor against sales, reconcile the POS to the bank every batch, and handle tips and sales tax correctly. Generic bookkeeping blends it into one number that hides the leaks.
Corviniti provides monthly bookkeeping to restaurants, cafes, bars, and multi-unit food businesses. The service is flat-priced: we categorize your transactions, reconcile every bank, credit card, and loan account, book payroll from your provider, and deliver financial statements on a fixed date, with cost of goods and labor tracked against sales so prime cost is a number you can act on. The team is led by a CPA with Big Four experience.
Watch
How we keep restaurant and cafe books
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Bookkeeping for restaurants & cafes, in three minutes
3 min
How we track prime cost every period, reconcile the POS to the bank across the processor and delivery apps, handle tips and sales tax, and what onboarding and cleanup look like.
0:00Why restaurants need specialized bookkeeping
0:45Prime cost: food and labor against sales
1:35POS and delivery-app reconciliation
2:20Tips, payroll, and sales tax
3:05Our satisfaction guarantee
Transparent Pricing
Restaurant bookkeeping: pick a plan
Flat monthly pricing sized to your restaurant. Each plan keeps the books current and reconciled; the higher tiers add prime cost reporting, KPI dashboards, and hands-on support as the operation grows.
Basics
Simple, accurate bookkeeping every month. Best for solo owners with < $50k monthly expenses.
Every plan is flat monthly and month to month, with no long-term contract. Catch-up and cleanup, if you need it, is a separate one-time project quoted up front. Volume above the Professional tier is quoted to scope, so contact us for a specific number.
How We Help
What you get
On a restaurant engagement, you get books that track prime cost and reconcile the POS to the bank, kept current every month by a CPA-led team that understands restaurant economics.
Monthly books, reconciledEvery bank, card, and loan account reconciled to the statement, transactions categorized, and statements delivered on a fixed date.
Prime cost trackingFood and labor tracked as a percentage of sales every period, so you can act while it is still adjustable.
POS reconciliationPOS sales, processor deposits, and delivery-app payouts reconciled to the bank, batch by batch, from Toast, Square, or Clover.
Delivery-app breakoutDoorDash and Uber Eats booked at gross with commission and fees separated so you see true delivery margin.
Tips, payroll, and sales taxTipped-wage payroll booked to reconcile, credit-card tips cleared, and sales tax posted to a liability and filed.
Lender and lease-ready financialsAccrual-clean, restaurant-standard records a bank, landlord, or equipment lender will accept.
When companies bring us in
You only see your food and labor cost once a year, too late to change ordering, portioning, or scheduling.
Sales from the POS, the card processor, and the delivery apps never reconcile to what actually lands in the bank.
Tips, tipped-wage payroll, or sales tax are handled loosely and you worry about how they would hold up.
You are opening a second location or signing a lease and need books a lender or landlord will trust.
The number that decides
Prime cost: food and labor as a share of sales
Prime cost is food plus labor as a share of sales, the number that decides a restaurant. Getting to it starts with clean capture: daily sales from the POS are reconciled to the bank every batch, and delivery-app payouts from DoorDash and Uber Eats are netted and matched. Then the formula: food cost plus labor cost equals prime cost, read as a percentage of sales. A full-service target is often 55 to 60 percent; above it, food or labor is drifting. Because prime cost decides the month before rent or anything else does, tracking it by location and period catches a slipping food or labor line in a week, not at year-end.
Prime cost for a restaurant or cafe. Illustrative target range.
This is for you if
You only see your food and labor cost once a year, too late to change ordering, portioning, or scheduling.
Sales from the POS, the card processor, and the delivery apps never reconcile to what actually lands in the bank.
Tips, tipped-wage payroll, or sales tax are handled loosely and you worry about how they would hold up.
You are opening a second location or signing a lease and need books a lender or landlord will trust.
What you get
Monthly books, reconciled Every bank, card, and loan account reconciled to the statement, transactions categorized, and statements delivered on a fixed date.
Prime cost tracking Food and labor tracked as a percentage of sales every period, so you can act while it is still adjustable.
POS reconciliation POS sales, processor deposits, and delivery-app payouts reconciled to the bank, batch by batch, from Toast, Square, or Clover.
Delivery-app breakout DoorDash and Uber Eats booked at gross with commission and fees separated so you see true delivery margin.
Tips, payroll, and sales tax Tipped-wage payroll booked to reconcile, credit-card tips cleared, and sales tax posted to a liability and filed.
Lender and lease-ready financials Accrual-clean, restaurant-standard records a bank, landlord, or equipment lender will accept.
The Detail
The gaps, and how we close each one
Service 01
Prime cost: food and labor as a percentage of sales
Prime cost, food plus labor divided by sales, is the number that decides whether a restaurant makes money or closes. Most owners see it once a year at tax time, long after the ordering, portioning, and scheduling that drove it are set. A point or two of drift on a thin-margin business is the whole profit line, and by the time it shows up in an annual statement there is nothing left to do about it.
How we handle it
We track cost of goods and labor against sales every period, so prime cost is in front of you while it is still adjustable. Food cost, beverage cost, and both hourly and salaried labor are coded against the sales they support, and you get the percentage each period alongside the dollars. That is the view that lets you change a vendor order, retune portions, or fix a schedule this week instead of finding out at year-end. For most restaurants this is the single report that changes how they run the line.
Service 02
POS reconciled to the bank, every batch
Sales run through the POS, settle through a card processor, and land in the bank days later net of fees, while cash, comps, voids, and gift cards move on their own paths. When nobody ties the POS batch to the deposit, money goes missing quietly, theft has room to hide, and the sales figure in the books never matches what actually rang up.
How we handle it
We reconcile POS sales to processor deposits to the bank, batch by batch, so every dollar is accounted for and a shortfall surfaces fast instead of at year-end. We pull daily sales, tax, tips, discounts, and payment types from your point-of-sale, match them to the processor settlement and the bank, and book the fees where they belong. We work with the platforms restaurants use, including Toast, Square, and Clover, and bring that sales activity into your accounting file so the books reconcile to the register every day of the period.
Service 03
Delivery apps: DoorDash, Uber Eats, and third-party payouts
Delivery orders arrive net of commission, marketing fees, and adjustments, and each app pays out on its own weekly schedule that rarely matches a calendar month. Booked as the deposit hits, gross sales are understated, the commission you paid disappears into a single lump, and the sales tax the platform did or did not collect gets muddled. That is real money and a real compliance exposure sitting in a blind spot.
How we handle it
We book delivery-app revenue at gross and break out the fees, so you see true top-line sales and exactly what commission and marketing cost you per platform. Payouts from DoorDash, Uber Eats, and any other marketplace are reconciled to the app statements and to the bank, adjustments and refunds are caught, and the sales tax handling is coded to match who is actually remitting it. You end up able to compare the margin on delivery against dine-in and decide whether each platform is worth what it charges.
Service 04
Monthly bookkeeping and reconciliations
Most restaurant books fail in the same two places: transactions categorized wrong, and accounts that never get reconciled. Both compound, and by the time a lease renewal, a loan application, or a tax deadline forces the question, the profit number the owner has been watching all year is wrong and there is no time to rebuild it.
How we handle it
We run your books on QuickBooks Online or Xero on a monthly cycle. Every transaction is categorized against a chart of accounts built for a restaurant, every bank, credit card, and equipment loan is reconciled to the statement, and payroll from your provider is booked correctly, including the employer taxes owners routinely miscount as profit. You get a profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow summary on the same date every month, with a short note on anything that moved and one batched question list instead of a drip of emails.
Not sure where your prime cost actually sits? Talk to us, and the first clean month will put both numbers in front of you.
Tips are a common compliance problem. Tipped-wage rules, the tip credit, pooled tips paid out through the register, and credit-card tips that flow through the processor all have to be tracked and reported correctly, and payroll has to reconcile to the filings. Get the tip reporting wrong and you are exposed on both the wage-and-hour side and the payroll-tax side at once.
How we handle it
We book payroll from your provider so wages, tipped wages, tip credits, and employer taxes land in the right accounts and reconcile to the filings, even though we do not sell payroll as a standalone service. Credit-card tips captured at the POS are matched to what the processor paid and to what payroll paid out, so the tip liability clears cleanly and does not sit as a mystery balance. When the tip credit or an overtime calculation looks off, we flag it, because restaurants draw exactly that kind of scrutiny.
Service 06
Sales tax on food and beverage
Sales tax is the state’s money sitting in your account, and restaurants collect it on a mix that the rules split hard: prepared food, packaged goods, alcohol, and delivery can all be taxed differently, and the marketplace apps may collect on your behalf or leave it to you. Treat any of it as revenue and the shortfall surfaces at filing time with penalties attached.
How we handle it
We set the books up so sales tax collected posts to a liability, not to income, and reconcile that liability to what the returns actually remit. Taxable and exempt categories are coded correctly, the tax the delivery platforms collect is separated from the tax you owe directly, and the returns are prepared and filed on your state’s schedule. The result is a sales tax position that holds up, because the coding and the reconciliation are exactly what an examiner asks to see.
Service 07
Books a lender or landlord will trust
A second location, an equipment loan, an SBA package, or a new lease all require clean books someone else will underwrite. A landlord wants to see you can carry the rent; a lender wants accrual-clean statements that tie out. Books that are behind or unreconciled turn every one of those into a delay, or a no.
How we handle it
We keep accrual-clean, restaurant-standard records with the reporting a bank, a landlord, or an equipment lender expects, so your bookkeeping supports the next location instead of limiting it. When you are ready to sign a lease, finance a build-out, or bring in an investor, the numbers are already in a form the other side will accept, with prime cost and unit-level performance they can read, and the same practice that handles technical accounting for venture-backed and public companies stands behind them.
Service 08
How we work with your restaurant, month to month
A fair question before hiring any bookkeeper: what does the month actually look like from your side, and how do you reach us when something comes up?
How we handle it
The work is done in QuickBooks Online or Xero, read-only bank feeds, a connection to your POS and delivery platforms, and a shared inbox for the statements and bills we need. You get a fixed monthly delivery date, a standing way to reach us, video calls when a conversation beats an email, and a CPA who answers within one business day. You also get a CPA-led team at a flat monthly price a solo bookkeeper cannot match on depth, keeping your books to the standard the rest of our practice works to.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Do you do bookkeeping for restaurants and cafes specifically?
Yes, restaurants are a core part of what we do. That means tracking prime cost every period, reconciling the POS to the bank across the processor and the delivery apps, handling tips and tipped-wage payroll, and keeping food and beverage sales tax posted correctly. We work with the platforms restaurants use, including Toast, Square, and Clover, plus DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Do you track food and labor cost percentages?
Yes, prime cost is the number that matters most for a restaurant. We track cost of goods and labor against sales every period, so you can act on ordering, portioning, and scheduling while they are still adjustable rather than discovering the problem in an annual statement.
Can you reconcile our POS and delivery apps?
Yes. We reconcile POS sales, credit card processor deposits, and delivery-app payouts from DoorDash and Uber Eats to the bank, batch by batch, so every dollar is accounted for and discrepancies or theft surface quickly. We work with Toast, Square, and Clover.
How do you handle tips and sales tax?
We book tipped-wage payroll so wages, tip credits, and employer taxes reconcile to the filings, and we clear credit-card tips against what the processor and payroll paid out. Sales tax collected posts to a liability, is coded by category, and is filed on your state’s schedule, with the tax delivery platforms collect kept separate from what you owe directly.
Can you get books ready for a second location or a lender?
Yes. We keep accrual-clean, restaurant-standard records with unit-level performance and prime cost a bank, landlord, or equipment lender can read. When you are ready to sign a lease, finance a build-out, or bring in an investor, the numbers are already in a form the other side will accept.
How much does bookkeeping cost?
Flat monthly pricing based on your transaction volume, number of accounts, and whether you need cleanup first, not an hourly meter. Plans start at $350 a month. Tell us about your business and we will send a specific number, usually within one business day.
Which accounting software do you use?
Most of our clients are on QuickBooks Online, and it is what we recommend when a business is choosing a platform. We also work in Xero, and for larger or more complex companies, NetSuite and Sage Intacct. If you are on desktop QuickBooks, spreadsheets, or a shoebox, migrating to QuickBooks Online is part of setup, and you keep full ownership of the file.
Can you catch up books that are months or years behind?
Yes, and it is one of the most common ways engagements start. We rebuild from bank and credit card records, reconcile every account, and bring you current through the last closed month, then keep it current monthly. Cleanup is quoted as a one-time project alongside the monthly price.
What is your satisfaction guarantee?
If you are not fully satisfied in your first month, we refund that month’s bookkeeping fee, no hassle. That is up to a full free month to decide we are right for you. One-time catch-up and cleanup fees are non-refundable. See terms for details.
Our Guarantee
100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
If you are not fully satisfied in your first month, we refund that month’s bookkeeping fee, no hassle. That is up to a full free month to decide we are right for you. One-time catch-up and cleanup fees are non-refundable. See terms for details.
Why Choose Us?
More Time for You to Run Your Business
Running a business means your time is best spent serving customers and growing, not reconciling accounts or chasing down last month’s numbers. We handle the day-to-day bookkeeping so you can stay focused on the work, with clean, reliable financials whenever you need them.
We understand how small businesses actually operate: uneven cash flow, job or project-based income, and expenses that do not fit neatly into a box. Our approach is practical and built around that reality, giving you numbers that reflect what is really happening in your business.
