Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Restaurant Bookkeeper

Short answer: The questions that separate a restaurant bookkeeper from a general small-business bookkeeper are all about restaurant specifics: how they reconcile third-party delivery payouts, how they treat tips and service charges, whether they close on your period calendar or the regular calendar, how many days after close you get a P&L, and what you actually receive when they close. Ask those five before you ask about price. A bookkeeper who is vague on any of them will cost you more in cleanup than they save you in fees.

Restaurant bookkeeping is not general bookkeeping with food in it. The transaction volume is higher, the revenue arrives through four or five channels that each settle differently, and payroll carries tip and tax rules most industries never touch. Below are the questions worth asking in a first call, and what a good answer sounds like.

1. How many restaurants do you currently work with?

Not "do you work with restaurants." Ask for a number and a mix. There is a real difference between a firm with three restaurant clients and one with sixty, because the second has already solved the problems you are about to hand them.

Listen for whether they can name the systems without prompting: Toast, Square, SpotOn, Lightspeed on the POS side, and the delivery platforms on the revenue side. If they ask you what a comp is, or what you mean by a void, keep looking.

2. How do you reconcile DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub payouts?

This is the single best diagnostic question, because it is where most restaurant books quietly break.

The gross order total, the commission, the marketing fees, the refunds, and the sales tax handling are all different numbers, and the deposit that lands in your bank is net of all of them. A bookkeeper who records the deposit as sales is understating your revenue, understating your fees, and making your food cost percentage look better than it is.

A good answer describes recording gross sales, booking the platform fees as an expense, and reconciling to the payout statement rather than the bank deposit. If they say "we just book what hits the bank," that is the answer that matters.

3. How do you handle tips, service charges, and tip-outs?

Tips are a liability, not revenue. Service charges usually are revenue, and they are treated differently for payroll tax. Tip-outs between front and back of house have to flow through payroll correctly or you have a compliance problem sitting on your books.

Ask specifically how credit card tips move from the POS to payroll, who reconciles the tip liability account, and how often it gets cleared. A restaurant bookkeeper will have a routine. A general bookkeeper will improvise.

4. Do you close on a calendar month or on my period calendar?

If you run a 4-4-5 or 13-period calendar, a bookkeeper who only closes calendar months will hand you comparisons that are not comparable. February against March is a five-week month against a four-week month, and any conclusion you draw about labor or food cost is noise.

Ask whether they can close on your calendar, and whether their reporting will show period over period alongside the same period last year.

5. How many days after period close do I get a P&L?

Make them give you a number. "Shortly after" is not a number. "By the 20th" is a number, and it is a slow one.

The useful range for a restaurant is somewhere inside the first two weeks after close, because a P&L that arrives on the 25th is describing a month you can no longer do anything about. If you get your February numbers in late March, you have already run most of March blind.

Also ask what happens when they miss. A firm with a real process will tell you what their on-time rate is. A firm without one will tell you it never happens.

6. What exactly do I receive at close?

"A P&L and a balance sheet" is the floor, not the answer. Ask what else:

• Prime cost broken out, with food and labor as a percentage of sales
• Sales by channel, so you can see what delivery is actually contributing after fees
• Period over period and same period last year
• A cash position you can trust
• Multi-entity or per-location reporting if you run more than one

The point of closing the books is not compliance. It is that you can make a decision about a menu, a schedule, or a vendor with numbers you believe.

7. Who actually does the work, and who do I talk to?

Ask whether the person on the sales call is the person on your account. Ask whether the work is done in-house or subcontracted, and where. Ask what happens when your bookkeeper is out for two weeks.

Restaurant questions are time-sensitive and often small: a vendor credit that looks wrong, a payroll item that does not match. You want a named human who knows your business, and a response time you can plan around.

8. How do you price, and what changes the price?

Restaurant bookkeeping is usually priced monthly, by location, with the drivers being transaction volume, number of bank and card accounts, payroll complexity, and how many entities you run.

Ask what is included and what is billed separately. Catch-up work on prior periods, sales tax filings, 1099s, and year-end packages for your CPA are common add-ons. Ask what would trigger a re-quote, so that a second location or a new delivery channel does not turn into a surprise.

Three answers that should end the conversation

"We will get you the statements when they are ready." No commitment on timing means no process behind it.

"We book the delivery deposits as they come in." Your revenue and your fees will both be wrong, every month.

"We can clean this up in a few days." On books that are six months behind, with delivery reconciliation and payroll to true up, a few days is not a plan. It is a way to win the deal.

What to do with the answers

Ask all eight to two or three firms and the differences will be obvious, because the good answers are specific and the weak ones are general. Take notes on the delivery reconciliation answer in particular. In our experience it predicts the quality of everything else in the file.

If you are evaluating restaurant bookkeeping right now and want a straight answer on how FIXE handles any of the above, get in touch. We will tell you what we do and what we do not.