Hospitality Accounting
Accepting Q2 2026 engagements
Fully remote · Nationwide US
Chef's Ledger.

Where hospitality and accounting
actually understand each other.

Specialist accounting, daily cash reconciliation, F&B cost controls, and multi-venue consolidation — built for restaurants, hotels, bars, and catering operators. Not generalist CPAs trying to learn your business on your dime.

Schedule a Consultation What We Do
10th
Day of each month
your books are closed
100%
Hospitality-focused
no generalist clients
24/7
POS-to-GL integration
real data, not exports
4x
Hospitality verticals
restaurants, hotels, bars, catering
What We Do

Eight services,
built for hospitality.

Hospitality isn't a niche — it's an entire economy of daily cash, thin margins, complex tip structures, multi-entity ownership, and systems that don't talk to each other. Everything below is designed for that reality.

01 / FLAGSHIP

Full-Service Monthly Accounting

End-to-end bookkeeping with a hospitality-native chart of accounts, bank reconciliation, intercompany allocations across your venues and entities, and a closed-by-the-10th month-end. You get a clean GL, a board-ready P&L, and a dedicated lead accountant who actually knows hospitality. This is the core engagement.

Month-End CloseMulti-Entity GLHospitality COABank Rec
SIGNATURE
02

Daily Sales & Cash Reconciliation

Every service period, reconciled. POS sales, comps, voids, discounts, tip-outs, deposits, and cash variance — tied to the penny, every day, across every venue. The single strongest cash control available to hospitality operators.

Daily Sales ReconCash ControlPOS Tie-Out
03

Payroll, Tips & Service Charges

Payroll processing, tip pool management, service charge allocation, tipped-minimum-wage compliance, and banquet gratuity accounting. The math hospitality operators get wrong — done right.

PayrollTip PoolService Charges
04

F&B Cost Controls & Menu Analytics

Food cost percentage, beverage cost percentage, menu mix analysis, margin by item, waste tracking, and theoretical-vs-actual variance. The reports your chef needs and the GM actually uses.

Food Cost %Menu MixMargin Analysis
05

Multi-Entity Consolidation

Multiple venues under one parent? Restaurant group, hotel portfolio, bar collection, catering arm — we consolidate cleanly, allocate intercompany correctly, and keep each entity audit-ready on its own.

ConsolidationIntercompanyTransfer Pricing
06

Sales, Occupancy & Excise Tax

State and local sales tax, hotel occupancy tax, resort fees, liquor excise, and local surcharges. We track rate changes, file on time, and handle nexus reviews across every market you operate in.

Sales TaxOccupancyLiquor Excise
07

Financial Reporting & KPIs

Monthly P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and hospitality-specific KPIs: RevPAR, ADR, GOPPAR, cover counts, check average, prime cost, labor percentage, and cost-per-cover. For hotels, full USALI 12th Edition reporting.

USALIRevPARPrime CostLabor %
08

Systems & POS Integration

Sage Intacct builds for multi-venue groups, QuickBooks for independents, chart-of-accounts design for hospitality, OPERA Cloud integration for hotels, and pipelines from Toast, Square, Aloha, Micros, and every POS in between. Set it up once, correctly.

Sage IntacctOPERA CloudToastSquare
Our Story

Built for the operators
we've actually worked for.

Chef's Ledger was founded by accounting professionals who spent years inside hospitality operations — multi-venue restaurant groups, hotel portfolios, nightlife brands, and catering companies.

The work began because the gap was obvious. Generalist CPAs treat restaurants like retail with a weird chart of accounts. They don't know how tip pools actually work, why F&B costing is a nightly discipline, or how to consolidate a holding-company-and-venue structure. That gap costs operators money — in overpaid tax, underreported margins, and missed shrinkage.

We built the firm we wish the industry had: hospitality-fluent, disciplined on daily cash, precise on cost of sales, and realistic about how restaurants, hotels, and bars actually run. Clients focus on the floor. We make sure the books are tight, the numbers mean something, and the close happens on the 10th — every month, without the chase.

MISSION
Precision books.

Give hospitality operators the accounting discipline, cash controls, and reporting clarity that every other industry takes for granted — and that hospitality has been told it can't have.

APPROACH
Specialist first.

Every engagement is led by professionals whose working knowledge is hospitality-specific: POS integrations, tip pools, USALI, multi-entity structures, daily sales recons. No learning curve on your dime.

CLIENTS
Operators who scale.

Restaurant groups, hotel portfolios, nightlife brands, and catering companies who have outgrown their bookkeeper and need a real accounting partner. Serious operators only.

Why We're Different

Not a general firm
that also does restaurants.

Every report we produce, every control we design, every system we build — shaped around how hospitality businesses actually run.

Hospitality Fluency

Every engagement is structured around hospitality-specific workflows from day one. Tip pools, service charges, USALI, cost of sales, nightly cash recs — fluent, not learning.

Daily Cash Discipline

POS-to-bank reconciliation every single day, across every venue. The tightest cash control posture available to cash-intensive hospitality operators.

POS-to-GL Integration

Your Toast, Square, Aloha, OPERA, or Micros — tied to a hospitality-native GL with real data pipelines. No spreadsheet exports, no manual entry.

Multi-Venue Native

Restaurant group, hotel portfolio, bar collection — we consolidate cleanly, allocate intercompany correctly, and keep each entity's books audit-ready on its own.

Documentation-First

Every policy paper-trailed. Every allocation methodology-backed. Every recon documented. So when the review comes, the work is already done.

Discretion as Discipline

NDA-first engagements. No client names published anywhere. Segmented access, vetted team, and the monthly close delivered on schedule — every month, without the chase.

Who We Serve

Four hospitality verticals.
One discipline.

Every service we offer is built for operators across the hospitality economy — whether you run a single concept, a restaurant group, a boutique hotel, or a catering platform.

Vertical 01

Restaurants & Groups

Independent chef-driven concepts through multi-venue restaurant groups. Fine dining, fast-casual, QSR, and everything in between.

  • POS-to-GL integration (Toast, Square, Aloha)
  • F&B cost controls & menu analytics
  • Tip pool & service charge accounting
  • Multi-venue consolidation & reporting
Vertical 02

Hotels & Boutique Properties

Full-service, boutique, and resort properties that need USALI-compliant reporting, occupancy tax filings, and F&B-to-rooms integration.

  • USALI 12th Edition chart of accounts
  • OPERA Cloud / Sage Intacct integration
  • RevPAR, ADR, GOPPAR reporting
  • Occupancy tax & resort fee compliance
Vertical 03

Bars, Lounges & Nightlife

Beverage-led concepts, cocktail bars, nightclubs, and hybrid venues with entertainment, cover charges, and cash-heavy operations.

  • Daily cash & vault reconciliation
  • Liquor cost & pour-cost tracking
  • Door & cover charge revenue
  • Entertainer 1099 & contractor comp
Vertical 04

Catering & Events

On-premise catering, off-premise events, private dining, and banquet operations with complex revenue recognition and cost accounting.

  • Banquet revenue & event P&L
  • BEO-to-GL event costing
  • Service charge & gratuity allocation
  • Subcontractor & vendor management
Engagement

Flat monthly retainer.
No surprises.

Three engagement tiers built around venue count and operational complexity. Every tier includes a named lead accountant, month-end close on the 10th, and direct access — no ticket systems, no junior associates you've never met.

Single Venue
1 location · 1 entity
$2,950 / month
Starting. 12-month engagement; 30-day notice.
  • Monthly close by the 10th
  • Hospitality-native chart of accounts
  • Daily sales & cash reconciliation
  • Bank & credit card reconciliation
  • P&L, balance sheet, cash flow
  • Sales tax filings
  • Year-end books packaged for your CPA
  • Quarterly strategy call
Schedule a Call
Multi-Venue
2–6 locations · multi-entity
$5,450 / month
Starting. Consolidated reporting across venues.
  • Everything in Single Venue, plus:
  • Consolidated multi-entity GL
  • Intercompany allocation rules
  • F&B cost controls & menu mix
  • Tip pool & service charge mgmt
  • KPI dashboard (prime cost, RevPAR)
  • Monthly strategy call
  • Named lead · 48-hour SLA
Schedule a Call
Group / Platform
7+ venues · holding structure
Custom scoped
Priced to engagement. Typical range $12K–$28K+.
  • Everything in Multi-Venue, plus:
  • Fractional CFO hours
  • Board-ready financial packages
  • USALI reporting for hotel portfolios
  • M&A and transaction support
  • CPA liaison for federal/state tax
  • Custom Sage Intacct build
  • Dedicated portal · Weekly call
Scope With Us
Behind on books? We do catch-up and cleanup engagements on a project basis.
Questions

The ones
you're going to
ask anyway.

If it's not here, ask us directly.

Restaurants (independent and group), hotels (boutique, full-service, resort), bars and nightlife concepts, and catering/events operators. If it has a POS, a nightly cash count, or an occupancy tax filing, we do the accounting. We don't take unrelated industries — focus is the whole point.
No. Chef's Ledger focuses on monthly accounting, daily cash control, F&B and labor costing, multi-entity consolidation, and state/local hospitality tax filings (sales, occupancy, excise). For federal and state income tax returns, we partner with specialist hospitality CPAs we trust and refer you to. You get fully structured, month-closed books from us; they handle the tax prep.
Sage Intacct is our preferred system for multi-venue groups and hotel portfolios — it handles intercompany allocations, consolidated reporting, and dimensional reporting cleanly. For single-venue operators, QuickBooks Online or Enterprise works well. We integrate with Toast, Square, Aloha, Micros, OPERA Cloud, and most hospitality POS and PMS systems. If your current setup needs changing, we'll say so and handle the migration.
Tip pools, service charges, and gratuities are where most generalist firms get hospitality accounting wrong. We design tip pool methodologies (by role, by shift, by percentage), track them through payroll, and handle the distinction between mandatory service charges (taxable income to the employer) and voluntary tips (flow-through to staff). All documented, all compliant with federal and state labor rules.
Hotels use the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI 12th Edition) — a different chart of accounts, different department-level reporting, and different KPIs (RevPAR, ADR, GOPPAR, flow-through). Rooms, F&B, banquets, and ancillary revenue each have their own reporting logic. We build USALI-compliant structures from the start, integrate with OPERA Cloud or similar PMS, and deliver department-level P&Ls that match brand-standard reporting.
We're an accounting and advisory firm led by senior professionals with hospitality-specific experience — not a public CPA practice. We handle bookkeeping, controller work, daily cash control, F&B costing, multi-entity consolidation, and state hospitality tax. For federal/state income tax returns, we coordinate with specialist hospitality CPAs so nothing falls between the cracks.
A clean engagement with organized historical books takes 2–4 weeks. A cleanup engagement — which is common in hospitality — takes 30–90 days depending on venue count and condition. Cleanup is quoted separately before ongoing work starts. First close is slowest; every close after is on the 10th.
Every engagement begins with a signed NDA. Client files are segmented, access is role-based, and we never publish client names or logos — not on this site, not in marketing, not in pitch decks. References are provided on request with client permission only.
Schedule a Consultation

Let's talk
about your books.

A free, 30-minute consultation. We'll review your current structure, identify the operational accounting gaps costing you money, and tell you straight whether we're the right firm — or who is.

Email
Accounting@chefsledger.com
Phone
(818) 631-1057
Hours
Mon–Fri, 9 AM–6 PM PT
Response SLA: 48 hours

CONFIDENTIAL. Everything here is held under NDA. We never publish client names, logos, or engagement details.