Read your P&L top to bottom: sales, cost of goods sold, payroll, then operating and admin costs. Read it next to your balance sheet, where tips, sales tax and delivery receivables live and where errors often hide. To trust it, compare each month to the last and scan the detail for duplicates or missing bills.
Start with the section-by-section guide, then learn which reports matter and how to check them.
Because neither is your money. You're holding tips for your team and sales tax for the state, so both sit on the balance sheet as liabilities until they're paid out. That's also why your P&L sales won't match the total your POS collected.
Often it's payroll timing, not staffing. Two biweekly payrolls cover four weeks, but most months run a few days longer, so a good bookkeeper accrues the extra days. Without that accrual, your labor percentage swings for no operational reason.
Three areas: delivery app receivables, which should be about one week of deposits; prepaid expenses like annual insurance, which should shrink as they're allocated; and tips owed, which shouldn't exceed one payroll. A receivable that keeps growing without deposits means something wasn't reconciled.
Compare it to last month and look for lines that jumped, dropped or vanished, like a missing utility bill. Then scan the general ledger detail for duplicate vendor charges, especially on autopay, and confirm beginning and ending inventory and every payroll for the period are there.
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