BOOKS
Sidework Books is the accounting we needed for our own bar. Your POS posts itself overnight, vendor invoices turn into bills, and the tip liability actually matches what's in the safe. No bookkeeper re-typing eight months of receipts in February.
Last night posted at 4:12am
Sales by category, comps, the card batch and declared tips. Nobody touched it.
Built behind a bar
Beer, wine, spirits, N/A, food, comps, voids, tip liability, undeposited funds. The account list you actually use, not a generic template with “Sales” and “Cost of Sales” and a shrug.
Every trading day lands as a balanced entry before you're awake: revenue by category, sales tax, the card batch, cash, comps and discounts.
Scan the liquor invoice once. It becomes a bill, hits the ledger, and clears itself when the payment turns up on the bank feed.
Cash goes drawer to safe to bank, in round numbers, whenever somebody makes a run. Books is built for that. Undeposited funds mirrors the safe instead of nagging you to zero it out.
Declared cash tips, card tips and tip-outs run through a real liability account, so what the staff is owed never quietly becomes revenue.
P&L, balance sheet, cash flow and trial balance off the same ledger, on the same numbers. Close a period and it locks.
Real double entry
Plenty of restaurant tools will bucket your spending and call it accounting. This is double entry, where debits equal credits, enforced down in the database. That's the difference between a nice report and books your CPA can file from.
Ready to close
Bank, cards and AP all reconciled through the 31st.
The honest comparison
We ran our bar on these. Here's the fair version of each. Go price them yourself, we'd rather you did.
Real accounting. No idea what a keg is.
Genuinely good at ops. Not your ledger.
Restaurant accounting that IS the ledger.
Category pricing as published by the main vendors in August 2026. Some don't publish rates at all; those figures come from third-party listings and vary by group size. Prices change, so check them yourself.
Plug in your POS and the bank
The account list is already there. No setup project, no consultant, no four-week implementation.
Go run service
Sales, tips, card batches and vendor invoices post while you're on the floor.
Reconcile Tuesday morning
Match the bank against the ledger. The rules handle everything you've seen before.
Close the month
Lock the period, pull the statements, send them to your CPA.
Books starts filling the day you join Sidework, whether you've bought it or not. Turn it on and last quarter is sitting there waiting.
POS connections
We're live with Toast and Square today, and we build custom connections to other systems on request. Tell us what you're running and we'll tell you straight whether it's a week or a month.