Who We Help · Cafes · Bookkeeping
Cafe bookkeeping: the day closes when the POS, the bank, and the tip jar agree
A cafe earns pennies per cup, which means the books cannot wait for month-end. The day sheet from the POS becomes one clean entry every day, card tips run through a clearing account instead of revenue, delivery apps get booked at gross so the commission is visible, and shrink gets counted in litres of milk and trays of pastries. That daily rhythm is what we set up for cafe owners across the GTA.
By the AnalytIQ Accounting team · Last reviewed: August 12, 2026
One daily entry, built from the Z-report
Every operating day should land in the ledger as a single structured entry taken from the POS close — Square and Lightspeed both produce the summary we need. Sales post by category (espresso bar, brewed coffee, food, retail beans, merchandise), tenders split between cash and card, and the card batch is expected in the bank net of processor fees within a day or two. When the entry is daily, a missing deposit or a doubled batch surfaces while the shift is still fresh in someone's memory.
Ontario adds a wrinkle most generic bookkeepers miss: qualifying prepared food and beverages sold for $4.00 or less get a point-of-sale rebate of the provincial portion, so the customer pays only the 5% federal part. If the POS tax flags are wrong, you are either overcharging regulars or under-remitting on the GST34 — and the error repeats hundreds of times a day. We verify the flags against the menu when we onboard, and again whenever the menu changes.
Tips are a clearing account, not revenue
Card tips belong to your staff, but they land in your bank account — so they post to a tip clearing liability, never to sales. The account should return to zero every payout cycle; a balance that keeps growing means someone is being shorted, and a balance that goes negative means the till is funding tips out of revenue.
How tips leave the clearing account matters for payroll. Tips the employer controls — pooled by the house and redistributed on a schedule — are controlled tips: pensionable, insurable, and reported on the T4. Tips staff take directly are not. Most cafes running card tips through the POS are in controlled-tip territory whether they realize it or not, and the CPP and EI cost belongs in your labour number. The mechanics live on our cafe payroll page; the bookkeeping job is keeping the clearing account honest.
Delivery apps: book the gross, expense the fee
Uber Eats, DoorDash, and SkipTheDishes deposit a net figure, and posting that net number as revenue quietly breaks three things. Your sales are understated, so channel comparisons are meaningless. The commission disappears, so you never see what the app channel really earns after the platform's cut. And the HST charged on the commission — which is an input tax credit you are entitled to — never gets claimed. We post app orders at gross, put each platform's commission on its own expense line, and reconcile every payout statement to the bank.
Once the fee is visible, the decision gets easier: an app order and a counter order are different businesses, and the menu pricing on each should reflect that.
Where the money comes from, and how each line posts
| Money in | How it posts | What we watch |
|---|---|---|
| Counter sales — card | Gross to sales by category; processor fees to their own expense line | Fees as a share of card volume |
| Counter sales — cash | Deposited intact; over/short logged daily | Variance patterns by shift |
| Delivery apps | Gross sales; commission expensed; HST on commission claimed as an ITC | Margin per platform after the cut |
| Card tips | Tip clearing liability, paid out through payroll | Clearing account returns to zero each cycle |
| Gift cards | Liability when sold; revenue when redeemed | Outstanding balance against redemptions |
| Retail beans and merch | Taxable retail, its own category with its own cost | Retail margin kept out of the bar number |
Shrink you can count: milk, pastries, and the waste log
In an espresso-led cafe, milk is usually the single biggest input after labour, and it walks out the door in steamed ounces nobody measures. Pastries expire on a schedule. So we track two simple numbers weekly: dairy cost as a share of beverage sales, and a waste log for baked goods — what was made or bought, what sold, what was tossed or marked down as day-olds. A creeping ratio is the earliest signal you have of over-pouring, over-ordering, or an untrained hand on the steam wand, and it shows up weeks before the month-end food cost does.
Supplier invoices flow through Dext into QuickBooks Online, coded to bar, kitchen, or retail, so cost ratios come straight from the ledger. If your roaster invoices in USD or your espresso machine came from a US or Italian dealer through a US distributor, the FX and import side is covered in our cafe cross-border tax guide. What a full monthly close includes — reconciliations, HST filings, and a statement pack you can read — is on our bookkeeping services page.
Common questions.
Should I record delivery app payouts as my sales?
No — the payout is net of commission. Book the gross order value as revenue and the commission as an expense, which keeps channel margins honest and lets you claim the input tax credit on the HST the platform charges you.
Are card tips part of my revenue?
No. They post to a tip clearing liability and get paid out to staff. If the house pools and distributes them, they are controlled tips — pensionable, insurable, and reported on T4s — so the payroll cost is real even though the tip itself is not yours.
What should the daily close actually catch?
That the Z-report ties to the bank — cash deposited intact, card batches arriving net of fees — that over/shorts are logged, and that HST flags are right, including the Ontario point-of-sale rebate on prepared food sold for $4.00 or less.
Related reading
Books that close with the till.
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