5 Best Restaurant Accounting Software

Best for:

• Owner-managed restaurants. If you’re heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of your restaurant, you may not need as many restaurant-specific features, making QuickBooks Online a great fit. High-priced restaurant-specific accounting software is great for providing information to owners, but it’s not as necessary when the owner is very hands-on.

• Startup restaurants. QuickBooks can easily provide all the necessary bookkeeping features if your restaurant is in its initial stages. As your restaurant empire grows, you can access hundreds of powerful integrations that scale with you, including great restaurant integrations like MarginEdge, discussed next.
• Restaurant owners who want to outsource bookkeeping. If you want to outsource as much bookkeeping as possible, QuickBooks Online is the obvious choice. You can easily find a ProAdvisor in your area and grant them direct access to your books.

QuickBooks Online is a flexible pick for smaller restaurants, cafes, bistros, and startups. QuickBooks has everything you need to pay your bills, track costs, and produce quality financial statements. It can track income and expenses by project, location, and class. 

For instance, you can easily produce reports separating activity by alcohol, food, and catering across multiple locations. You can also use project tracking to measure the profitability of individual catering jobs or special events.

QuickBooks won’t help you manage your restaurant, but it will integrate with most POS systems that offer helpful restaurant features. You could set up recipes as inventory build items and track your raw materials being turned into dishes, but that would be terribly inefficient. If you like QuickBooks’ flexible accounting features but want restaurant features, I recommend integrating QuickBooks Online with MarginEdge.

QuickBooks Online aced my rubric for accounting features, but it only got a 2.5 for restaurant features. While it won’t help determine the cost of recipes, schedule your employees, or provide EDI with your vendors, it does offer integrations with many great POS systems like Toast. 

One of the things I like most about QuickBooks as a software for restaurant accounting is how easy it is to find help. In addition to its own bookkeeping service, QuickBooks Live, QuickBooks has a huge network of ProAdvisors in the US who are familiar with QuickBooks.

Best for:

• Owner-managed restaurants. If you’re heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of your restaurant, you may not need as many restaurant-specific features, making QuickBooks Online a great fit. High-priced restaurant-specific accounting software is great for providing information to owners, but it’s not as necessary when the owner is very hands-on.

• Startup restaurants. QuickBooks can easily provide all the necessary bookkeeping features if your restaurant is in its initial stages. As your restaurant empire grows, you can access hundreds of powerful integrations that scale with you, including great restaurant integrations like MarginEdge, discussed next.
• Restaurant owners who want to outsource bookkeeping. If you want to outsource as much bookkeeping as possible, QuickBooks Online is the obvious choice. You can easily find a ProAdvisor in your area and grant them direct access to your books.

QuickBooks Online is a flexible pick for smaller restaurants, cafes, bistros, and startups. QuickBooks has everything you need to pay your bills, track costs, and produce quality financial statements. It can track income and expenses by project, location, and class. 

For instance, you can easily produce reports separating activity by alcohol, food, and catering across multiple locations. You can also use project tracking to measure the profitability of individual catering jobs or special events.

QuickBooks won’t help you manage your restaurant, but it will integrate with most POS systems that offer helpful restaurant features. You could set up recipes as inventory build items and track your raw materials being turned into dishes, but that would be terribly inefficient. If you like QuickBooks’ flexible accounting features but want restaurant features, I recommend integrating QuickBooks Online with MarginEdge.

QuickBooks Online aced my rubric for accounting features, but it only got a 2.5 for restaurant features. While it won’t help determine the cost of recipes, schedule your employees, or provide EDI with your vendors, it does offer integrations with many great POS systems like Toast. 

One of the things I like most about QuickBooks as a software for restaurant accounting is how easy it is to find help. In addition to its own bookkeeping service, QuickBooks Live, QuickBooks has a huge network of ProAdvisors in the US who are familiar with QuickBooks.

Best for:

• Bars. The Freepour smart scale will pay for itself by catching overpours and drink giveaways. You can quickly and accurately take bar inventory of your alcohol nightly for comparison with hypothetical alcohol usage based on sales. 

• QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage Intacct users. Although MarginEdge has accounting features, it’s only suitable for tracking restaurant transactions and isn’t a complete accounting solution.
  
  So, MarginEdge’s integration with the accounting platforms makes it easier to account for income, expenses, A/R, and A/P using standard bookkeeping procedures. MarginEdge is a great way to add restaurant features without a complicated accounting software conversion if you started your restaurant with solid bookkeeping software and need more. 

MarginEdge is the perfect complement to QuickBooks Online for restaurants. It combines QuickBooks Online’s outstanding accounting features with powerful restaurant features like recipe costing and commissary kitchen support. While I recommend QuickBooks Online as your bookkeeping integration, there are other great software, such as Sage, Xero, AccountEdge, and Microsoft Dynamics GP. 

A great new feature of MarginEdge is the Freepour smart scale for an additional $150 per month. Bar owners (as well as fans of Bar Rescue) know that overpouring can cost you serious cash. The Freepour smart scale allows you to inventory the alcohol left in your open bottles to calculate the actual alcohol poured in an evening and compare it with the theoretical alcohol poured based on sales.

I don’t recommend using MarginEdge without a bookkeeping integration, so I evaluated it while integrated with QuickBooks Online Plus. With the integration, MarginEdge scored perfectly for the accounting features I look for in restaurant accounting software. 

For restaurant features, MarginEdge received better marks than QuickBooks Online alone, but not as good as Restaurant365. A few of the missing restaurant features include employee scheduling, sales forecasting, and EDI with vendors. MarginEdge scored great for customer service since it offers multiple contact methods, including phone, email, and live chat with a human.

Best for:

• Food carts and trucks with very little food left over at the end of the day. Since Wave doesn’t allow for inventory, it records the expense of food when you purchase it rather than when it’s sold. However, if you have a lot of leftovers, you might be better off with software that includes inventory features to match the cost of the food to the sales revenue.

• Food truck owner-operators. If you own and operate your own food cart, food truck, or similar establishment, you don’t need expensive software to provide insight into what’s happening. You know what’s happening because you’re the one making it happen.

Restaurant accounting software is useful for tracking food on hand, recipe costs, food costs,  and waste. Not every establishment needs these capabilities and will do well with simple software that tracks income and expenses for their tax return. Food trucks, carts, and other very small establishments have little food inventory, so they have little need to track it in detail.

Wave is very affordable and works much like QuickBooks for simple expense tracking. You can connect your bank account (with the Pro plan) and categorize your income and expenses as you import them. If you have catering or larger jobs, you can send professional invoices and track them until you’re paid.

Wave aced my pricing rubric. It offers a free plan, but its paid plan is only $16 per month and includes unlimited users. For comparison, QuickBooks Simple Start offers similar features for $35 per month for a single user.

Wave’s basic accounting features are solid, but it doesn’t have some of the more advanced accounting features sit-down restaurants might like, such as tracking inventory and separating activity by class and location. Check out QuickBooks Online if you don’t want to pay for restaurant features but need good inventory accounting. 

Also, Wave lacks restaurant features, so I only recommend it for very small food establishments where the owner is personally involved and has little food inventory. If you need restaurant features, I recommend Restaurant365.

Best for:

• Catering businesses and restaurants that want to manage customer orders, create packing slips and pick tickets, and generate itinerary reports to outline expected delivery times and destinations.

I recommend Food Service Ace because of its comprehensive catering software. It helps you plan catering events by forecasting cash flows based on proposals, tracking deposits, organizing event workflow, and issuing final invoices. The other features are similar to those found in Restaurant365, but without upfront pricing.

Food Service Ace scored poorly in pricing because it doesn’t provide any estimate of price on its website. At the very least, it could’ve enumerated the features in its custom pricing model to provide users with a general impression about its custom plan.

I can’t overlook its lack of accounting software integrations either. Although Food Service Ace has built-in accounting features, I believe that access to other third-party software will give users more flexibility and better ease of use, especially for those who need advanced accounting features. MarginEdge is my top recommendation for restaurant software that integrates with accounting software like QuickBooks, Sage, and Xero.