Running the books for a restaurant is not like running the books for a law firm or a retail shop. You have a daily sales summary instead of customer invoices, you have tips that are partly employer wages and partly pass-through, you have food and beverage cost-of-sales that have to be tracked against revenue tightly enough to catch a 2-point margin slip, and you have tipped employees whose paychecks involve tip credit, tip allocation, and a Form 8846 FICA tip credit at year-end. Most generic accounting tools either ignore tipped payroll or charge you a per-employee monthly fee that eats your margin. FreshLedger Pro is a one-time-purchase Windows desktop accounting and payroll package built for owner-operators who want to keep the books in-house, hand a clean file to their CPA at year-end, and not pay a subscription every month for software they already own.
FreshLedger Pro covers the parts of restaurant bookkeeping that generic tools skip: 1. Tipped-employee payroll. The payroll module separates direct wages, reported cash tips, and charged tips on the paycheck. It calculates the employer FICA on tips and tracks the figures you need for Form 8846 (Credit for Employer Social Security and Medicare Taxes Paid on Certain Employee Tips). Tip credit against the federal minimum-wage obligation is applied per pay period, and the W-2 at year-end populates Box 1, Box 5, Box 7 (Social Security tips), and Box 8 (allocated tips) correctly. 2. Daily sales journal import. Most POS systems (Toast, Square, Clover, Aloha) can export a daily sales summary as CSV. FreshLedger imports that file as a daily journal entry: gross sales by category (food, liquor, beer, wine, NA bev), comps, discounts, sales tax payable, tips collected, tips paid out, and cash over/short. You get one tidy entry per day instead of 400 micro-transactions. 3. Food cost tracking. Inventory items can be coded to COGS sub-accounts (Food Cost, Liquor Cost, Beer Cost, Paper) so your P&L shows prime cost and food cost percentage without a spreadsheet sidecar. Purchase invoices from Sysco, US Foods, or a local produce vendor post directly to those COGS lines. 4. Full MACRS depreciation. Restaurant equipment (5-yr property), furniture and fixtures (7-yr), leasehold improvements and qualified improvement property (15-yr under current law) are all handled with proper half-year or mid-quarter conventions per IRS Pub 946. Section 179 and bonus depreciation elections are tracked per asset. 5. 1099-NEC tracking. Music acts, cleaning contractors, and repair vendors flagged as 1099-eligible roll up to a year-end 1099-NEC run. 6. Free Accountant Edition. Your CPA opens the same file in a read-write Accountant Edition at no cost, makes adjusting entries, and sends it back.
Workflow 1: Daily close. At end of service, the manager exports the POS daily sales report as CSV. In FreshLedger, you open Daily Sales Import, point at the file, and confirm the mapping (Food Sales -> 4010, Liquor Sales -> 4020, Sales Tax Collected -> 2200, Charged Tips -> 2310 Tips Payable, Cash Tips Declared -> memo only, Cash Over/Short -> 6990). The system posts one balanced journal entry dated for that business day. Deposits to the bank the next morning are matched against the day's cash and credit card batches when you import the bank OFX file at week-end. Workflow 2: Tipped payroll run. Friday is payday for a biweekly period. You open Payroll, pull each tipped server's hours and reported tips (imported from POS or keyed from the tip declaration sheets). FreshLedger calculates gross wages at the tipped minimum (e.g., $2.13 federal or your state's tipped rate), applies tip credit up to the full minimum wage, withholds federal income tax per the 2020+ W-4, withholds FICA on wages plus reported tips, and computes employer FICA. The paycheck nets out cash already taken home as tips, so the printed check or direct deposit ACH file is just the residual. At quarter-end, Form 941 pulls the right wage and tip totals. At year-end, Form 8846 calculates the FICA tip credit your CPA will claim on the return. Workflow 3: Equipment purchase and depreciation. You buy a new walk-in cooler for $14,000 in March. You enter it in Fixed Assets as 5-year property, MACRS, half-year convention. You elect Section 179 for the full amount (assuming taxable income supports it) or take bonus depreciation per current-year rules. FreshLedger generates the monthly depreciation entries and the Form 4562 detail your CPA needs.
A few accounting concepts are unique to food service and FreshLedger handles them directly. Tip reporting under IRC Section 6053 requires employees to report tips of $20 or more per month to the employer; those reported tips become wages subject to FICA, which is why the W-2 Box 7 and Box 5 split matters. Allocated tips (Box 8) apply to large food and beverage establishments (more than 10 employees on a typical business day) that don't meet the 8% gross receipts tip threshold and have to allocate the shortfall - FreshLedger flags this and computes the allocation. The FICA Tip Credit on Form 8846 lets the employer recover the 7.65% employer-side FICA paid on tips above the federal minimum wage equivalent. For a 20-server operation this is real money - often $8,000 to $20,000 a year in federal credit. Prime cost - cost of goods sold plus labor as a percentage of sales - is the operating number that matters in this industry, and FreshLedger's P&L can be grouped to show it. Qualified Improvement Property (QIP), since the 2020 CARES Act technical correction, is 15-year property eligible for bonus depreciation, which matters for any build-out or remodel. Sales tax handling is per-jurisdiction; FreshLedger tracks liability by tax authority so a multi-rate city/county/state stack reconciles cleanly.
FreshLedger Pro is $799 one-time. The optional payroll tax table update is $99/year and is what you need if you're running payroll in-house past the current tax year. A single-location independent restaurant with 15 employees running QuickBooks Online Plus plus QuickBooks Payroll Core is realistically looking at $90-$170 per month, or roughly $1,200-$2,000 per year, every year. FreshLedger pays for itself inside the first year against that comparison and keeps paying for itself every year after. If you only run payroll for half a year (seasonal operation), you can skip a year of updates and pick them up later. If you outsource payroll to a service like Gusto or ADP, you don't need the $99 update at all - FreshLedger still handles your books, POS imports, food cost, and depreciation for the flat $799.
FreshLedger Pro is not the right tool for every restaurant. If you run multiple locations and need managers at each store posting into the same live file simultaneously, the single-user-at-a-time file model will frustrate you - look at a cloud multi-tenant system. If your owner or bookkeeper works from an iPad in the dining room, there is no native mobile app; the software is Windows desktop (it runs in Parallels or VMware Fusion on a Mac, but that's a workaround). If you want bank transactions to flow in automatically every night via a live bank feed, FreshLedger doesn't do that - you download OFX/QFX/QBO files from your bank's website and import them, typically once a week. And because it's real double-entry accounting, the learning curve is steeper than a receipts-and-invoices app.
One-time-purchase accounting software with built-in payroll, full depreciation handling, and a free Accountant Edition for your CPA.
Buy FreshLedger Pro — $799One-time purchase. No subscription. Free Accountant Edition included.