The first question
Who reconciles my daily sales across the point-of-sale system and the delivery apps?
Rationale Services does. We take daily sales from your point-of-sale system, the settlement reports from each delivery platform, and your bank and card deposits, and we tie all three together for every day in the period. Where they disagree, we find out why and record the reason.
Most restaurant owners have one number they trust — the register total — and three or four platform dashboards nobody has ever reconciled against it. The result is revenue counted twice, or not at all, and a cost of sales percentage that moves for no visible reason. Once the channels are reconciled on a schedule, your sales figure stops being an estimate and starts being a fact you can build decisions on.
- Daily sales taken from your point-of-sale system
- Settlement reports from every delivery platform
- Bank and card deposits tied to both
- Differences explained and recorded, not absorbed
Where your margin goes missing
Why is the money from delivery platforms less than what the platform says I sold?
Rationale Services separates the gross order value from what actually reaches your bank. Commission, promotional discounts, delivery charges, refunds, adjustments and payout timing all sit in between. We record each piece in its own account, so you can see the full cost of selling through each platform rather than a single net deposit.
Recording only the deposit hides the commission completely. Sales look smaller than they are and costs look lower than they are, which pushes every margin calculation wrong in the same direction. We book gross sales and each deduction separately, then report the net result by platform. That is the number you need before deciding whether a channel is worth keeping, repricing or dropping.
How do I find out what my food cost really is?
Rationale Services builds cost of sales from your purchase invoices and your inventory counts rather than from a guess. With opening stock, purchases for the period and closing stock in place, we report food cost as a share of revenue and show you how it moved against the periods before it.
Food cost calculated from invoices alone tells you what you bought, not what you used. The difference is either sitting in your walk-in or it has gone out the back door. We will tell you what a count needs to cover and how often to do it, then keep the calculation identical every period so the trend carries information instead of noise.
Is my labor cost too high?
Rationale Services reports labor cost as a share of revenue, split the way you actually run the restaurant: kitchen against front of house, hourly against salaried, scheduled hours against hours paid. One month on its own tells you very little. The same measure across several periods tells you a great deal.
We take hours and pay from the systems you already use and set them against sales for the same days. If you run more than one shift pattern or more than one site, we keep them separate so a bad week in one place does not vanish into an average. Combined food and labor cost as a share of revenue is the single figure most owners end up watching weekly, and we put it at the top of the monthly report.
Services
The services restaurants use most
The same work described elsewhere on the site, set up the way a restaurant needs it.
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Bookkeeping
Restaurant bookkeeping with every sales channel reconciled against the bank.
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Accounting and reporting
Monthly accounts and management reporting built for operators.
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Licenses and registration
Business licenses and registration when you open another location.
Payroll, multiple sites and what we need from you
Can you run payroll for hourly staff whose shifts change every week?
Yes. Rationale Services runs payroll for restaurants with hourly staff, variable schedules, overtime, several pay rates and steady turnover. We take hours from the system you already use, process the pay run, and post the result into your books so labor cost lands in the period that earned it.
Hours, rates and overtime have to carry through into payroll records and into the books the same way every period. We set that flow up once, write it down, and keep it unchanged, so the figures reconcile instead of needing to be explained. Payroll describes the run itself.
How do I compare my locations against each other?
Rationale Services reports each location as its own set of numbers and then side by side on one page: sales, food cost, labor cost and contribution per site, on identical definitions. Shared overhead is allocated on a basis you agree with us and then left alone so the comparison holds over time.
Comparison only works if every site is measured the same way, which usually means changing how one or two of them have been recorded. We standardize the chart of accounts across locations first. After that, the monthly report tells you which site is carrying the group, which one is improving, and which one has a problem that is specific to it rather than to the market.
What do you need from me every week?
Rationale Services keeps the weekly list short: access to your point-of-sale reporting and your delivery platform statements, your bank and card feeds, purchase invoices, and payroll hours. Once access is set up we pull most of it ourselves. The inventory count is the one thing only your team can do.
We would rather collect data from systems than from people, because systems do not get busy on a Friday night. After setup, the usual weekly ask is the stock count and an answer on anything in the numbers that looks unusual. How we work sets out the onboarding sequence in full, and how we scope an engagement.
Questions
Common questions from restaurant owners
Do you work with my point-of-sale system?
Almost certainly. We work from the reports and exports your system produces rather than requiring a particular product. If it can produce a daily sales summary and an item-level export, we can work with it.
Can you take over books that are several months behind?
Yes. Catch-up work is common in restaurants. We agree how far back to go, rebuild the periods in order, reconcile each one, then move you onto a regular close so it does not happen again.
Do you prepare tax returns as well as the bookkeeping?
Yes — see taxation. Current, reconciled books make return preparation faster and far less painful, which is the strongest practical argument for closing every month.
Can you work with us remotely?
Yes. We work remotely with businesses across the United States, and restaurant records are well suited to it because almost everything we need already lives in a system we can be given access to. See where we work.
Get your sales channels reconciled
Tell us how many sites and channels you run and we will set out what a close would look like.