Industries · restaurants & hospitality
From the POS to the ledger — books that tie out daily.
POS reconciliation, prime cost, tips handled as the liability they are, and a P&L an operator can run the week from. Built by a founder who spent six years inside a full resort operation — spa, restaurants, and golf course on one P&L.
Bookkeeping and the monthly close — payroll-tax treatment of tips stays with your payroll provider and CPA.
In brief
Restaurant books, in plain terms.
What's the core discipline?
Daily POS reconciliation: sales by tender tied to bank deposits, tips set aside as a liability, processor fees and comps explained — so the register and the bank never quietly disagree.
What does an operator get monthly?
A P&L built for running a restaurant — prime cost readable, COGS by category, labor against sales — closed on the standard cadence, by the 10th.
Why trust Westgate with hospitality books?
David spent six years at a resort hotel — spa, restaurants, and golf course under one roof. He's seen the full hospitality P&L from inside the operation, not across a desk.
What does it cost?
Monthly from ~$450 (restaurants typically sit above the floor — volume and POS complexity), cleanup typically $1,500–$5,000. Fixed fee in writing after a free review. Pricing →
The work, concretely
Four disciplines that keep restaurant books true.
POS reconciliation
Daily sales summaries by tender — card, cash, delivery platforms — tied to actual deposits, with fees, tips, and comps explained instead of dumped into undeposited funds.
Prime cost, readable
Food, beverage, and labor coded so prime cost reads on demand. The two levers you actually control, visible while there's still a week to pull them.
Tips as a liability
Staff money never inflates your revenue. Tips flow through the books as the pass-through they are; payroll-side tax treatment stays with your payroll provider and CPA.
COGS that means something
Vendor purchases categorized to match how you actually cost the menu — so a margin question gets an answer, not an archaeology project.
The lived experience
Six years inside a full hospitality operation.
David's hospitality years weren't spent visiting clients — they were spent at a resort hotel with a spa, restaurants, and a golf course under one roof. That's the widest version of this industry's bookkeeping problem: multiple revenue centers with different cost structures, POS systems feeding one set of books, seasonal swings, and a single P&L that had to tell the truth about all of it at once.
Restaurants were part of his daily reality there — the prime-cost pressure, the tender-by-tender reconciliations, the difference between a busy month and a profitable one. So when your restaurant's books come to Westgate, the standard they're held to was set by someone who has closed hospitality books from the inside. The background is told plainly on the about page; serving Houston's dining scene and operators across Texas is where it gets used.
A restaurant can have a great month at the register and a terrible month in the bank, and the books are the only place that explains the difference. Six years inside a resort taught me to respect the daily numbers — by month-end, the story's already been written.
Twenty years with a national nonprofit. Six years at a resort hotel — spa, restaurants, and golf course. Five years with a church. He has seen these books from the inside.
Restaurant & hospitality FAQ
The questions operators ask.
QuickBooks file already tangled with undeposited funds? QuickBooks cleanup → · behind on months? Bookkeeping cleanup → · all industries →
For operators
Get your restaurant's books reviewed — free.
A senior operator looks at your POS-to-bank reality and tells you the truth — what's tied out, what's drifting, and a fixed-fee scope in writing to fix it. No pressure between lunch and dinner service.