Guides · chart of accounts

A restaurant chart of accounts, built to be reconciled.

QuickBooks' default chart is built for a business that sends invoices and waits to get paid. A restaurant collects money in four forms before the night is over, owes some of it to its staff, and has to know its food cost by Tuesday. Here is the account list that supports that, why each unusual account exists, and the three netting habits that quietly destroy the numbers you were trying to produce.

LedgerInbox · September 2026 · corrections@ledgerinbox.com

First: turn account numbers on

QuickBooks Online hides account numbers by default. Settings → Account and settings → Advanced → Chart of accounts → Enable account numbers. Without them the chart sorts alphabetically, which puts Bank charges next to Beverage sales and makes every report a hunt. With them, the chart sorts into ranges and the ranges are what make subtotals mean something.

The one design rule

A restaurant is managed to prime cost — cost of goods plus total labor — and the target is somewhere near 60% of sales. If prime cost cannot be read off the P&L without a spreadsheet, the chart has failed, no matter how tidy it looks. So: COGS occupies one unbroken range, labor occupies the next, and nothing else is allowed inside either.

Everything below follows from that, plus one more rule that matters more than it sounds: record money at gross, and record what was taken out of it separately. Every netting shortcut costs you a number you will later need.

1000 · Assets

Assets — the four places money sits before it is yours
Code	Account	What lands here
1010	Operating checking	The bank feed. Deposits, card settlements, every payment out.
1012	Card settlements clearing	Card sales on the day they are earned, cleared when the processor's deposit arrives two days later.
1015	Cash in drawer / safe	Counted cash between the close and the deposit slip.
1020	Petty cash	The paid-out float. Not the drawer.
1200	Inventory — food	Only if the client actually counts. If they don't, don't create it.
1210	Inventory — beverage	Same test. A liquor program usually earns its count; a coffee shop does not.

1012 is the account most charts are missing, and its absence is why so many restaurant books never reconcile cleanly. A Friday night's card sales are revenue on Friday and cash in the bank on Sunday. Without a clearing account those two facts fight over the same line, and the answer is usually to post sales on the deposit date — which throws every daypart, every weekly food cost, and every month-end boundary out by two days.

2000 · Liabilities

Liabilities — money in the till that belongs to someone else
Code	Account	What lands here
2010	Accounts payable	Vendor invoices — Sysco, US Foods, the linen company.
2100	Sales tax payable	Collected at the register, never revenue, remitted monthly. If sales tax is inside a revenue account, the P&L is overstated by the tax rate.
2110	Gift cards outstanding	Credited when a card is sold, debited when it is redeemed. A sold gift card is not a sale; it is a promise.
2210	Tips payable	Charged tips from the moment the card settles until the server is paid — through payroll or out of the drawer.
2220	Payroll liabilities	Withholding and the employer share, between run and remittance.
2300	Accrued expenses	The month's utilities before the bill arrives.

2110 and 2210 are the two accounts that drift silently, because nothing in the daily entry is wrong — the liability just never gets proven against its own history. Tips have their own rollforward and their own failure mode: tip liability journal entries, and the monthly proof.

4000 · Revenue

Revenue — split by how it is costed, not by how it is sold
Code	Account	Why it is its own line
4000	Food sales	Pairs with 5000 to give food cost %.
4010	Beverage sales — non-alcoholic	Different margin, different cost line.
4020	Beverage sales — beer & wine	Split from liquor if the licence or the pour cost differs.
4030	Beverage sales — liquor	The highest-margin, highest-shrinkage category in the building.
4050	Delivery sales — third party	Gross menu price, per platform. Not the payout. See below — this is the single most expensive mistake in the chart.
4060	Catering & events	Deposits, different labor shape, worth isolating.
4080	Retail & merchandise	Bottles, beans, t-shirts. Rarely material, always miscategorised.
4900	Comps & discounts (contra-revenue)	A debit against revenue, not an expense. Gross sales stay visible and the manager can see what was given away.

5000 · Cost of goods sold

COGS — mirrors the revenue split, line for line
Code	Account	Note
5000	COGS — food	Against 4000. The number the chef is managed on.
5010	COGS — non-alcoholic beverage	Against 4010.
5020	COGS — beer & wine	Against 4020.
5030	COGS — liquor	Against 4030.
5100	Paper & packaging	Takeout containers, cups, bags. A COGS line, not an office supply — and it moves with delivery volume, which is exactly why it belongs here.
5200	Delivery commissions	What DoorDash and Uber Eats keep. Inside COGS if delivery is a real channel, so the margin on it is visible.

6000 · Labor

Labor — the second half of prime cost, kept whole
Code	Account	Note
6000	Wages — kitchen	Back of house.
6010	Wages — service	Front of house. Tipped wages, not the tips themselves.
6020	Salaries — management	Fixed, and worth separating from the variable lines above.
6100	Payroll taxes	Employer share.
6110	Benefits & insurance	Health, workers' comp.
6200	Contract & agency labor	Still labor. Keep it in the range or prime cost lies.

Tips are not in this range. Charged tips are a liability (2210) that passes through the restaurant. Payroll systems routinely map them to a wage expense account, which inflates labor cost and leaves the liability unrelieved — two errors from one mis-mapping, and neither one shows up as an out-of-balance entry.

7000 · Operating expenses

Operating — grouped so a manager can act on a subtotal
Range	Group	Typical accounts
7000–7040	Occupancy	Rent, CAM, property tax, building insurance
7050–7090	Utilities	Electric, gas, water & sewer, waste, internet
7100–7140	Direct operating	Smallwares, linen, cleaning, pest control, uniforms
7150–7190	Repairs & maintenance	Equipment service, HVAC, hood cleaning
7200–7240	Marketing	Ads, promotions, third-party listing fees
7300–7340	Administrative	POS subscription, software, licences, professional fees
7400	Merchant & processor fees	Card processing. An expense — never netted against sales.
7450	Cash over/short	The reconciliation account. Small either way; a trend in one direction is the finding.

7450 is the account that turns a vague suspicion into a number. Computing cash over/short from a Toast export walks the daily math and the entry.

The three netting habits that break the chart

1 · Booking delivery at the payout

DoorDash deposits $712 for a day whose menu total was $1,000. Booking $712 as sales understates revenue by 29% and hides the commission entirely. Food cost percentage then looks catastrophic, because the food went out at full portion cost against three-quarters of the revenue. Book $1,000 to 4050 and $288 to 5200. Same net, honest ratios, and the commission becomes negotiable because it is finally visible.

2 · Booking card sales net of processing fees

The same error, smaller: a 2.6% haircut applied silently to every card sale. Post gross to revenue, the fee to 7400, and the difference reconciles against the processor statement instead of disappearing.

3 · Treating comps as marketing expense

A comped entrée never generated revenue, so calling it an expense inflates both sales and costs. It belongs in 4900 as contra-revenue, where gross sales, comps and net sales all stay readable.

What posts itself, and what still needs a person

With this chart in place, a daily sales entry from Shogo or Bookkeep will map cleanly: revenue by category, tax to 2100, tips to 2210, card totals to 1012, cash to 1015. That automation is real and worth keeping. What it cannot do is prove any of it — what a daily sales entry structurally cannot see covers the gap: whether the cash arrived, whether the tip liability ties, and which deposit belongs to which service day.

What not to build

The failure mode on the other side is a 300-account chart nobody codes to consistently. Three tests before adding an account: does a decision change based on it, will it hold more than a rounding error in a year, and can a manager put a receipt in the right place without asking? If the answer to any of those is no, it is a class or a memo, not an account. Use QBO classes for location and projects for a catering job — not new accounts.

Scope note: this is a US-centric chart for an owner-operated restaurant on QuickBooks Online, and the numbering follows the Uniform System of Accounts for Restaurants loosely rather than exactly. A multi-entity group, a franchise with royalty reporting, or a client on accrual inventory will need more. Tell us what we got wrong — corrections@ledgerinbox.com — and we will fix the page.

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