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Best Practices
What to Look For When Hiring a Restaurant Bookkeeper
Ryan
Short answer: Hire for restaurant-specific knowledge first, responsiveness second, and price third. The fastest way to test the first one is to ask how they handle tips, third party delivery deposits, and comps. A restaurant bookkeeper answers all three instantly and specifically. A general bookkeeper gives you a reasonable-sounding answer to the first and hesitates on the other two. That hesitation is the whole interview.
Most bad bookkeeping hires are not bad bookkeepers. They are competent people who have never had to book a Grubhub deposit that arrived four days late and 22 percent short, and who reasonably assumed the deposit was the sale.
So here is what to test for, and how.
What makes restaurant bookkeeping different from regular bookkeeping?
Seven things. If a candidate cannot speak fluently about these, they will be learning on your books, and you will be paying for the lesson twice: once in fees and once in decisions made on wrong numbers.
| The thing | The right handling | The common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Tips | A liability. Money you are holding for staff and paying out | Booked as revenue, which inflates sales every period |
| Service charges | Revenue, and usually taxable, because the house sets the amount | Treated identically to tips, which is the error that draws audits |
| Delivery app deposits | Gross sale recorded, fees recorded separately as an expense | Net deposit recorded as the sale, hiding both revenue and the fee |
| Comps and voids | Reduce sales | Recorded as an expense, which overstates both sales and costs |
| Inventory | Counted and adjusted, so food cost reflects what was used | Purchases treated as cost of goods, making food cost swing wildly |
| Payroll accrual | Accrued across the period, since pay periods rarely match months | Whatever cleared the bank that month, so labor looks random |
| Gift cards | A liability until redeemed | Revenue at sale, which pulls income into the wrong period |
What questions should I ask when interviewing a restaurant bookkeeper?
Six, in this order. The first three are knowledge tests and the last three are working-relationship tests.
- "Walk me through how you book a DoorDash deposit." The answer should mention gross sales, fees as a separate expense, and the timing gap. If they describe recording the deposit amount, stop there.
- "Where do tips live on my financials?" Balance sheet, as a liability, until paid out. Any answer involving the income statement is wrong.
- "How do you handle a month where payroll lands three times?" They should talk about accruals without being prompted.
- "How many days after close do I get my P&L?" Make them say a number of business days. Then ask what happened the last time they missed it.
- "Who specifically will I be emailing, and what happens when they are on vacation?" You are testing whether there is a named person or a queue.
- "What do I get if I leave?" Your file, your chart of accounts, your history. A good answer is immediate and boring. A vague one is a warning.
Should I hire in-house, use a local CPA, or outsource?
It depends almost entirely on scale, and the ranges are reasonably predictable.
One location
A local CPA or independent bookkeeper with real restaurant customers is often the best fit, and the relationship tends to be close. The risk is key-person dependency: when they retire or get busy, you have no continuity. Ask who covers them.
Two to fifteen locations
This is the awkward middle where most groups struggle. Too much work for an office manager, not enough to justify a full-time controller. An outsourced restaurant bookkeeping service usually fits best here, because consolidation across entities is the hard part and it is what these services are built for.
Past twenty locations
An in-house accounting team starts to make sense, often alongside an outsourced service handling transactional volume while your controller handles analysis. Decide who owns the chart of accounts before you build this, because shared ownership of it is where these arrangements go wrong.
What are the warning signs in a restaurant bookkeeper?
- They quote a price before asking how many locations you have or how far behind you are.
- They cannot show you a sample restaurant P&L and explain its structure.
- They describe tips as income, in any phrasing.
- They say inventory is "not really part of bookkeeping."
- They will not commit to a delivery timeline in business days.
- They have no process for catch-up work, meaning they only take clean books.
That last one matters because most restaurants shopping for a bookkeeper are behind in some way. A provider who only accepts tidy books is not much use at the moment you actually need one.
How do I know my current bookkeeper is doing a good job?
Three tests you can run this week without confronting anyone. Check that your bank reconciliations are current through last period. Check that tips appear on your balance sheet rather than your income statement. Check whether your P&L arrives on a predictable date or whenever it happens to be finished.
If all three pass, you are in good shape. If the reconciliations are stale, that is the one to fix first, because everything downstream of it is unreliable.
At FIXE, restaurants are all we do, across 600+ restaurant locations, and we deliver a monthly P&L within 5 business days of period close. Whoever you are evaluating, hold them to a stated number rather than an adjective.
Frequently asked questions
Does a restaurant bookkeeper need to be a CPA?
No. Bookkeeping and tax preparation are different jobs, and many excellent restaurant bookkeepers are not CPAs. What matters is restaurant-specific competence and reliability. You will still want a CPA for tax filing and planning, and the two roles work well together when the books are clean.
How much should restaurant bookkeeping cost?
Pricing is normally driven by location count, transaction volume and how many entities need consolidating rather than a flat rate. Compare total first-year cost including setup and any catch-up work, since the lowest monthly rate often carries the highest onboarding fee.
Can I use a bookkeeper who is not local to my restaurant?
Yes, and for most operators it widens the pool toward specialists. Bank feeds, POS integrations and invoice capture all work remotely. Proximity matters far less than whether they know restaurants and answer quickly.
What should I hand over when I hire a restaurant bookkeeper?
Bank and credit card statements, POS and merchant processor reports, payroll registers and quarterly filings, sales tax returns, vendor invoices, and your current chart of accounts if one exists. Gathering all of it in one sitting at the start is the single biggest thing you can do to speed up onboarding.
How long does it take to switch bookkeepers?
A clean switch at a period boundary usually takes a few weeks to run in parallel and reconcile the first close. If you are behind, add the catch-up time on top. Never switch mid-period, and keep read access to the old system until the first new close is finished.
Not sure where your books stand before you start interviewing? Take the FIXE Health Score quiz.