Bookkeeping for Restaurants in Billings
Restaurants are one of the hardest small businesses to keep books for. Daily sales, tipped employees, food cost swings, and vendor credits all have to be tracked correctly or your P&L is fiction. Montana doesn't have a state sales tax, which helps — but everything else is standard restaurant complexity.
Daily sales entry, not batched
Book sales daily from your POS's daily sales summary — not weekly, not monthly. Break out food sales, beverage sales (alcohol separated from non-alcoholic), tips collected, comps and discounts, gift cards sold and redeemed, and cash overs/shorts.
Toast, Square for Restaurants, Clover, and Aloha all export a Z-report daily. That's your source document.
Handling tips correctly
Cash tips reported by employees and credit card tips paid out are wages for payroll tax purposes. They flow through payroll, not as an expense reduction.
Tip pools need clear tracking — who contributed, who received, and the calculation. Montana follows federal FLSA rules on tip credit; if you take the tip credit, documentation is critical in an audit.
Food and beverage cost
Ideal food cost is 28–32% of food sales, beverage cost 18–22% of beverage sales. If yours is wildly different, either your recipes are off or your inventory count is wrong.
Take a real inventory count monthly (weekly is better). Bookkeeping that doesn't include a monthly inventory adjustment produces meaningless COGS.
Sales tax — the Montana advantage
Montana has no general sales tax, which eliminates a whole category of restaurant bookkeeping pain. You still may owe resort tax if you're in a resort community (not Billings), lodging facility use tax if you have rooms, or specific taxes on alcohol.
POS integration
Toast and Square both integrate cleanly with QuickBooks Online. The integration should push daily sales journal entries automatically. Manually re-typing sales every day is not a real system.
A quick disclaimer
This article is general information for Montana small business owners, not tax, legal, or accounting advice for your specific situation. Rules change, and how they apply depends on facts we don't know about you. Before acting on anything you read here, talk to a qualified professional. If you're a Montana business owner and want a real conversation about your books, payroll, or tax, that's what Marlow Accounting is here for — call 406-290-1214 or schedule a discovery call.