Accountants everywhere already know how important it is to document every cent that goes into and out of a business. In restaurants, this may be easier said than done.
The accounts payable (AP) process in restaurants can be disorganized and disjointed, with numerous touchpoints divided across kitchen staff, management, ownership, and, in many cases, outsourced accountants. It makes restaurant AP more expensive and increases the likelihood of errors.
Restaurants have little need for AP’s counterpoint, accounts receivable. But they do need to account for every sale that’s made—and properly code those sales according to Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) groups, like Food, Beverage, and Alcohol. Coding beyond “Sales” is critical for accurate COGS calculations, which allow restaurant operators to see where they stand.
A significant portion of the restaurant industry relies on point of sale (POS) systems in order to track sales, not only for the benefit of accountants, but also for service staff and kitchens that could use a hand in organizing orders.
Although POS systems help simplify operations, the data those systems collect still needs to be transferred to the appropriate financial systems, usually leading to even more tedious manual data entry for accountants.
Most POS systems don’t always “talk” to accounting systems right out of the box, so restaurant operators and restaurant accountants who want to spare themselves another layer of data entry depend on integrations between software applications for an easy transfer of data.
Though integrating the POS and accounting systems is vital to capture all sales data accurately and eliminate the time spent on data entry, restaurants and accountants may find it difficult to justify the time, expense, and technical expertise required to implement and manage those integrations.
But there’s good news! Restaurant accountants who use both QuickBooks Online (QBO) and Toast for their point-of-sale system for their clients are in luck. xtraCHEF has recently unveiled a new product, Sync, that offers a free, easy-to-use integration between QBO and Toast, one of the restaurant industry’s most widely used POS systems.
Sync automatically sends daily sales data from Toast and transforms that data into journal entries in QuickBooks Online. All that’s required is to map the sales categories in Toast to General Ledger codes in QBO once in an easy-to-use mapping tool. From there, xtraCHEF will periodically sync sales data to QuickBooks within 24 hours.
The integration is not only efficient, but also free! Similar solutions on the market charge monthly subscription fees, which can add up quickly. Using Sync comes at no cost, no matter how many locations need to have their data uploaded.
Increase efficiency at your practice and save money for your restaurant clients with Sync! Learn more and sign up at https://xtrachef.com/sync/.