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Industries · restaurants & hospitality

From the POS to the ledger — books that tie out daily.

POS reconciliation, prime cost, tips handled as the liability they are, and a P&L an operator can run the week from. Built by a founder who spent six years inside a full resort operation — spa, restaurants, and golf course on one P&L.

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Bookkeeping and the monthly close — payroll-tax treatment of tips stays with your payroll provider and CPA.

POS reconciled, daily logic 6 years inside a resort operation
DAY'S SALES $ ████ THE POS CARD CASH DELIVERY TIPS = LIABILITY REGISTER → BANK · EXPLAINED, EVERY DAY

In brief

Restaurant books, in plain terms.

What's the core discipline?

Daily POS reconciliation: sales by tender tied to bank deposits, tips set aside as a liability, processor fees and comps explained — so the register and the bank never quietly disagree.

What does an operator get monthly?

A P&L built for running a restaurant — prime cost readable, COGS by category, labor against sales — closed on the standard cadence, by the 10th.

Why trust Westgate with hospitality books?

David spent six years at a resort hotel — spa, restaurants, and golf course under one roof. He's seen the full hospitality P&L from inside the operation, not across a desk.

What does it cost?

A fixed monthly fee, or a one-time fixed price for a cleanup — set in writing after a free review, never hourly. Restaurants sit a little above the floor for volume and POS complexity. See the pricing page for published ranges.

The work, concretely

Four disciplines that keep restaurant books true.

POS reconciliation

Daily sales summaries by tender — card, cash, delivery platforms — tied to actual deposits, with fees, tips, and comps explained instead of dumped into undeposited funds.

Prime cost, readable

Food, beverage, and labor coded so prime cost reads on demand. The two levers you actually control, visible while there's still a week to pull them.

Tips as a liability

Staff money never inflates your revenue. Tips flow through the books as the pass-through they are; payroll-side tax treatment stays with your payroll provider and CPA.

COGS that means something

Vendor purchases categorized to match how you actually cost the menu — so a margin question gets an answer, not an archaeology project.

The lived experience

Six years inside a full hospitality operation.

David's hospitality years weren't spent visiting clients — they were spent at a resort hotel with a spa, restaurants, and a golf course under one roof. That's the widest version of this industry's bookkeeping problem: multiple revenue centers with different cost structures, POS systems feeding one set of books, seasonal swings, and a single P&L that had to tell the truth about all of it at once.

Restaurants were part of his daily reality there — the prime-cost pressure, the tender-by-tender reconciliations, the difference between a busy month and a profitable one. So when your restaurant's books come to Westgate, the standard they're held to was set by someone who has closed hospitality books from the inside. The background is told plainly on the about page; serving Houston's dining scene and operators across Texas is where it gets used.

David Westgate, founder of Westgate Financial Services, with six years inside a resort hospitality operation
A restaurant can have a great month at the register and a terrible month in the bank, and the books are the only place that explains the difference. Six years inside a resort taught me to respect the daily numbers — by month-end, the story's already been written.
David Westgate Founder & Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Twenty years with a national nonprofit. Six years at a resort hotel — spa, restaurants, and golf course. Five years with a church. He has seen these books from the inside.

Restaurant & hospitality FAQ · Updated July 2026

The questions operators ask.

Volume, cash, and margins measured in single digits. A restaurant produces hundreds of transactions a day through a POS, takes payment in every form, carries tips that belong to staff rather than the business, and lives or dies on a prime cost the owner needs to see weekly, not annually. Generic bookkeeping treats a restaurant like an office with food in it — and the books drift within a quarter.
Tying what the point-of-sale system says you sold to what actually landed in the bank — daily sales by tender type (cash, card, third-party delivery), minus tips payable, processor fees, and comps, matched against deposits. When it's done right, the gap between the register and the bank is explained every day; when it's skipped, 'undeposited funds' quietly swallows the truth.
Prime cost is food and beverage cost plus labor — the two levers a restaurant operator actually controls, usually the majority of every sales dollar. Tracked weekly against sales, it tells you whether the operation is drifting before the month-end P&L can. Our bookkeeping is built so prime cost is readable on demand, not reconstructed at quarter-end.
Yes — as the liability they are. Tips collected through the POS belong to staff, not revenue, and the books must show them flowing in and out without inflating sales or profit. Payroll-side tip reporting and its tax treatment stay with your payroll provider and CPA — we keep the books that make their numbers tie.
Six years working at a resort hotel — a full operation with a spa, restaurants, and a golf course under one roof. That's broader than a single kitchen: multiple revenue centers, separate cost worlds, one P&L that had to make sense of all of it. Restaurants were part of his daily reality there, alongside everything else a hospitality property runs. It's real background, told plainly on the about page — not a client claim.
Carefully, because the deposit those platforms send you is nothing like your sales. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub take a large commission, sometimes withhold their own fees and adjustments, and pay you a net figure days later — so booking that deposit as revenue understates your sales and hides one of the biggest costs on your P&L. We record third-party orders at gross, break out the commission and fees as the expense they are, and reconcile each platform's payout against the orders behind it. That's the only way you can actually see whether delivery is making you money or quietly costing it.
A daily sales summary is a single journal entry, built from the POS each day, that captures the full picture: sales by category, sales tax collected, tips owed to staff, comps and discounts, and the breakdown by tender — cash, cards, third-party — so the day can be reconciled to what actually hit the bank. It's the backbone of honest restaurant books. Run daily, the gap between the register and the deposit is explained every single day; skipped, a month's worth of small discrepancies piles into 'undeposited funds' and nobody can untangle it. We set the summary up so the daily numbers stay true.
As the number that decides whether the kitchen is actually profitable. Food and beverage cost only means something when it's measured against sales over the same period, which takes recording purchases correctly and accounting for inventory on hand at period-end rather than treating every grocery order as an instant expense. We keep cost of sales and inventory tracked so your food-cost and beverage-cost percentages are real and readable — the levers that, alongside labor, make up the prime cost an operator lives and dies by.

QuickBooks file already tangled with undeposited funds? QuickBooks cleanup → · behind on months? Bookkeeping cleanup → · all industries →

For operators

Get your restaurant's books reviewed — free.

A senior operator looks at your POS-to-bank reality and tells you the truth — what's tied out, what's drifting, and a fixed-fee scope in writing to fix it. No pressure between lunch and dinner service.

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POS reconciled daily-true Prime cost readable Fixed fee, in writing
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