Gross sales on your POS report is almost never what hits the bank. There are too many moving parts in between. The reconciliation is really about tracking each piece from the customer’s payment to the deposit, and recording it in a way that matches reality.

Start with the daily Z-report or end-of-day summary from your POS. It should show gross sales broken down by category (food, beverage, beer, wine, liquor), then discounts and comps applied, then refunds, then net sales. Add sales tax collected. Add credit card tips collected on behalf of staff. That total is gross receipts, which is what customers actually paid you across all tenders.

Discounts and comps need to be tracked separately. A discount is a price reduction the customer accepted, like a happy hour special or a coupon. A comp is something you gave away, like a manager comping a meal for a complaint. Both reduce revenue, but they tell you different things about the business. If comps are climbing, something operational is off. If discounts are climbing, your promotions are eating margin. Code them to separate accounts so you can see the trend.

Refunds reduce gross sales too, but record them on the date the refund happens, not the date of the original sale. The POS usually handles this automatically.

Sales tax is not your money. You collected it from customers and you owe it to North Carolina (or whichever state). On the books, sales tax collected goes to a liability account, not revenue. When you file and pay, the liability clears. Recording tax inside sales is one of the most common restaurant bookkeeping mistakes and it inflates your revenue numbers while quietly underreporting what you owe.

Tips work the same way. Credit card tips belong to staff, not the restaurant. They come in attached to the customer’s card payment and go out either through payroll or as cash from the drawer at the end of the shift. Tips collected sit in a tips payable liability account until they get paid out. Cash tips usually never touch the books at all because customers hand them directly to staff and the staff keeps them.

Then comes the tender breakdown. The POS shows how customers paid (cash, Visa/Mastercard, Amex, Discover, gift cards, house accounts, third-party apps). Each tender behaves differently in the bank. Cash gets deposited when someone drops the bag at the bank, which might be daily or every few days. Credit cards batch out at the end of the shift and deposit one to three business days later, sometimes with Amex on a different timeline than Visa and Mastercard. Gift card sales add to a gift card liability and clear when the cards get redeemed.

Delivery apps deserve their own treatment. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub usually deposit weekly, not daily. They take a commission, sometimes 15 to 30 percent, before sending you the net amount. The POS may or may not capture these orders depending on integration. If the apps are not feeding into the POS, you have to pull their reports separately and book the gross sales, the commission expense, and the net deposit so the books reflect the real revenue. Booking only the net deposit understates revenue and hides how much commission you are actually paying.

Merchant fees are the other piece. Most processors deduct fees once a month as a single charge, so daily deposits come in at the gross batch amount and the fee shows up later. Some processors net the fee out of each deposit instead. Either way, merchant fees get booked as an expense, not as a reduction of revenue. You want to see what you sold and what processing cost you as two separate numbers.

The practical workflow is a daily sales journal entry built from the Z-report. Debit a credit card clearing account for the total card sales, debit cash for the cash that will be deposited, debit discount and comp expense accounts, debit a delivery app clearing account if applicable. Credit sales revenue by category, credit sales tax payable, credit tips payable, credit gift card liability for cards sold. The entry balances and captures the day correctly regardless of when the money actually shows up in the bank.

Then as deposits arrive, you match them against the clearing accounts. Tuesday’s card batch hits Thursday, and it clears Tuesday’s credit card clearing balance. Cash deposits clear whenever the bag goes in. Weekly delivery app deposits clear the accumulated balance in that clearing account, and the difference between gross sales and net deposit is the commission expense for that week. Any discrepancy between what should have hit and what did hit gets investigated quickly, while the day is fresh.

This is the kind of bookkeeping that takes discipline to do right but pays off in clarity. You see real revenue, real cost of payments, real tip flow, and real sales tax owed. Restaurants and bars are one of our top specialties at GMJ, and most owners we talk to are either skipping the reconciliation entirely or only recording net deposits, which leaves them with books that look nothing like the actual business. If you want help getting this set up properly, our restaurant and bar accounting work is built around exactly this. We also handle the broader picture of small business accounting, bookkeeping and tax services in Jacksonville, NC so the daily reconciliation feeds clean numbers into your monthly reports and tax filings.