How should a restaurant stay on top of daily vendor invoices and cash documentation?

Which document counts at each step from delivery to payment?

Each document a delivery produces settles one question:

File each ticket with its invoice.

Your accounting basis sets when a delivery reaches the books. On the accrual basis it belongs to the day you accepted it: FASB's Chapter 4 on elements of financial statements says acquiring assets on credit obligates an entity to pay for the assets. On the cash basis, the invoice waits as open until payment. Either way, each delivery is entered once, from one document: the invoice for a vendor that invoices each delivery, the matched statement for a vendor that bills only by statement, or the paid-out slip and receipt for a delivery paid from the drawer; on the cash basis that entry is made when you pay. Never enter it from the ticket alone, and never a second time from a statement.

If a vendor invoices each delivery, enter the invoices and use the statement only as a check. If it bills only by periodic statement, enter the statement after matching every ticket it lists, and keep those tickets as its detail. On the accrual basis, date each matched ticket's line to its delivery date, so a statement that crosses a month-end puts each delivery in the month it arrived. Reversing these roles enters a delivery twice or loses its detail.

What do you do at the door when a delivery is short, substituted or mispriced?

Catch the problem before the driver leaves, and keep it open until the credit is recorded:

1. Before signing, check the goods against your order and the ticket, including substitutions and any price that differs from the agreed one.
2. Write each short, substitution, damaged item or price difference on the ticket and ask the driver to initial it. If the driver will not, photograph the goods and the ticket and tell the vendor that day, so your record never depends on the driver.
3. Log the open credit (vendor, date, ticket, item, quantity and amount) and ask the vendor for a credit memo the same day.
4. Match the invoice to the annotated ticket, check each price against the agreed price, log any price difference as an open credit as you would a short, and mark the invoice "credit pending" so it stays out of any payment run. How to run that match against your orders is covered in the 2-way and 3-way matching question.
5. Enter the credit memo against that invoice when it arrives and close the log line. If the vendor instead reissues the invoice at the corrected amount, replace the original entry rather than adding a second one. Only then is the invoice ready to pay.

Once a short or overpriced invoice is paid in full, the correction becomes money you must recover from the vendor.

What has to happen every day, and what can wait for the week?

Delivery frequency, not office capacity, sets the daily load. Anything a delivery or a deposit depends on happens that day; checks that need a statement or a week of entries can be batched:

How do you check a vendor statement against your records before paying?

The statement is the vendor's outside view of your account, so it finds what your own records missed. Before each payment run, compare it with your record of that vendor:

1. Tick each statement invoice that matches one in your records by number, date and amount. Then list every entry in your records for the statement period that the statement does not show: a second entry for an invoice already ticked is a duplicate (step 3); the rest are invoices dated after the statement or entries to look into.
2. For an invoice you never recorded, find it and its signed ticket before entering anything, and with no ticket confirm with the kitchen that the delivery came. Never enter from the statement line alone.
3. Where one invoice is recorded twice, under the same number or from an original and a copy, remove the extra entry.
4. Compare your open-credit log with the statement's credits. An owed credit the statement lacks keeps its invoice on hold and goes back to the vendor.
5. Match the statement's payments to your bank record and your paid-out slips.
6. Pay each vendor its matched invoices less applied credits, checking the run vendor by vendor against those approved amounts, not only by total.

Pay each vendor only to the payment details you already hold for it; new or changed details, however they arrive, are not acted on in this routine.

Paying from the statement total skips all of this and pays duplicates and uncredited shorts.

What does one delivery look like from ticket to payment?

On Monday a produce vendor delivers against ticket 8812, one case of tomatoes short. The receiver writes the short on the ticket, the driver initials it, and the credit log gets a line for 42.00. Invoice 4471 arrives for the full order, 1,250.00, and is marked credit pending. Credit memo 212 for 42.00 arrives Thursday. The month-end statement lists both, they tick against the books, and the vendor's approved amount is 1,208.00. On the accrual basis:

Food purchases end at 1,208.00, what was delivered, and the vendor's balance at zero. On the cash basis, the invoice and credit memo are filed and logged but not posted, and the payment posts once, 1,208.00 to food purchases from the bank. On both bases the missing case never reaches food purchases and the delivered goods reach them once.

What belongs in the day's sales package?

The IRS's Publication 583 says you should keep supporting documents that show the amounts and sources of your gross receipts, and lists cash register tapes, bank deposit slips, receipt books, invoices and credit card charge slips among them. Keep the deposit slip with the register and card reports, not instead of them. Before a trading day counts as closed, its folder holds:

• The point-of-sale end-of-day report, with each shift's or register's report beneath it
• Sales by tender (cash, card, gift card, house account) and the voids, comps, discounts and refunds, with who authorized each
• The card processor's batch or settlement report and each ordering platform's order report for the day, treated as provisional until the payout detail that covers the day is filed with it (DoorDash's help article on financial statements says its Transactions figures are estimates)
• The signed drawer count sheet
• A paid-out slip for each paid-out, with its receipt attached
• A record of any sale the system did not capture
• The deposit slip copy or bank receipt, marked with the trading date
• The closing manager's initials, with any difference and its explanation

Keep the paper in one envelope per trading date until it is imaged, and the files in one folder per date, so the day can be pulled as a unit. Square's undated help page on sales summary reports, for example, says you can print, export, or copy links for the sales summary report, so the day's report can be saved into its folder as a file.

Where sales run across dayparts, shifts or registers, file each shift's or register's report under the day's summary, not just the day's totals, so an overage or shortage traces to the shift that produced it.

How do you tie each deposit back to the day it came from?

Mark every deposit with its trading date and take the day's sales from the package, never from the deposit. Paid-outs shrink the cash deposit, and card and platform money can arrive on a later day and, with some processors such as Square, net of fees, so a deposit recorded as sales misstates them: paid-outs and fees understate them, and settlement timing can move card sales between days. What a deposit should equal depends on where the money came from:

For example, Saturday's package shows cash sales of 1,840.00 and two paid-out slips, 65.00 for produce and 40.00 for ice, so the cash deposit should be 1,735.00. If the bank shows 1,710.00, the slips explain 105.00 of the 130.00 gap, and the remaining 25.00 is a shortage to investigate, not a change to sales.

For card deposits, Square's undated help page "Match transfers to sales" says payments missing from a day's transfer were most likely included in the following transfer, which can happen if they were accepted after your daily transfer cut-off time. The same page says a transfer's details show the individual card payments included in it. The page adds that Balance is not available with full service, quick service or bar modes, or in the Square Restaurants POS app, whose users view transfer details in the Square Dashboard, the only place transaction details can be downloaded as a CSV file. Square's undated page on its fees says processing fees are deducted before funds are transferred to your linked bank account. File each transfer's detail with the days it covers.

Other processors and platforms may time, net and report payouts differently; check yours in its own documentation before relying on this.

With third-party ordering or delivery platforms, the day's documented sales, the platform's sales and the amount deposited are three different figures. DoorDash's guide "How to Understand Your DoorDash Payout and Monthly Statement" (December 8, 2025) says its payout report shows the payout date, payout ID, status, sales, DoorDash commission and fees, marketing spend, amendments and net payout, and that clicking a payout shows which transactions were included. The guide adds that on the Merchant Portal's financial pages all columns sum up to the net total. DoorDash's undated help article "How to View Financial Statements in the Merchant Portal" says the Payouts page gives you the finalized payment data for your scheduled payouts, and that this should be the data used for your regular financial reconciliation, so file each payout's detail with the days it covers. How to record platform sales and fees is a separate question.

How should cash paid out of the drawer be documented?

Write a slip when the cash leaves the drawer, attach the vendor's receipt or ticket, and file both in the day's package. Each slip shows:

• The trading date and time
• Who received the cash and what it paid for
• The amount
• Who took the cash from the drawer and who approved it

The IRS's Publication 583 lists petty cash slips for small cash payments among the documents that support expenses, and says supporting documents should show the amount paid and that it was for inventory or for a business expense; for food or drink bought from the drawer, attach the vendor's invoice or cash register receipt to the slip, as Publication 583 lists both among the documents reporting the cost of inventory.

A paid-out without a slip leaves the deposit short with nothing to explain it, and the goods it bought never reach cost. Record a delivery paid from the drawer once, from its slip and receipt. When the vendor's statement shows it as paid, tick it there; do not enter it again as a payable.

How do you separate receiving, approving and paying in a one- or two-person office?

COSO's Internal Control — Integrated Framework executive summary says segregation of duties is typically built into the selection and development of control activities, and that where it is not practical, management selects and develops alternative control activities. With two people, split the duties like this:

Where one office person does all the paperwork, the owner runs these checks from the owner's own access, never from copies or reports that person supplies:

• Read the bank and card statements through your own online banking login, and match each vendor payment to an approved invoice.
• Have vendors send statements to an address you read, and compare them with the books.
• Each month, check a few paid invoices against their signed tickets.

Initial and date each bank, card and vendor statement you review, and keep each month's list of sampled invoices with that month's files.

Where the owner does everything alone, there is nobody to separate duties from: the vendors' and the bank's statements are the outside evidence, and the weekly routine is the check.

How should food, beverage, supplies and services be coded?

The IRS's Publication 583 gives a line to start from: inventory is any item you buy and resell to customers and, for a manufacturer or producer, includes the cost of raw materials or parts bought to make finished products; expenses are the costs you incur (other than the cost of inventory) to carry on your business. Apply that line as your test:

• Food. Everything that goes on the plate goes to a food cost-of-sales account.
• Beverage. Drinks you sell go to a separate beverage cost-of-sales account, with alcohol split out if you report it separately.
• Supplies. Cleaning chemicals, smallwares and other items used up in running the restaurant go to an operating expense account.
• Services. Repairs, linen, pest control and other outside services go to their own operating expense accounts.

Decide borderline items, such as to-go containers, once and write the decision down.

Code each invoice line by what the item is, not by which vendor sold it: a broadline distributor's invoice can carry food, drinks and cleaning chemicals, and coding the whole invoice to food moves supplies into food cost. Keep a written list of accounts with examples and use it every time. FASB's Chapter 3 on qualitative characteristics of useful financial information says consistency refers to the use of the same methods for the same items, and that comparability is the goal and consistency helps to achieve it. If the same fryer oil lands in food one week and supplies the next, totals stay right but the food-cost figure moves while nothing in the kitchen changed.

How should fragile receipts and system-only reports be stored?

Fading paper should never be the only copy. The IRS's Publication 583 says an electronic storage system is any system for preparing or keeping your records either by electronic imaging or by transfer to an electronic storage media, and that it must index, store, preserve, retrieve, and reproduce the electronically stored books and records in legible format. Publication 583 adds that the system must provide a complete and accurate record of your data that is accessible to the IRS, and is subject to the same controls and retention guidelines as your original hard copy books and records.

Publication 583 says the original hard copy may be destroyed provided the system has been tested to establish that the records are being reproduced in compliance with IRS requirements for an electronic storage system, and procedures are established to ensure continued compliance with all applicable rules and regulations. For details it points to Revenue Procedure 97-22. Until both conditions are met, keep the originals too. Scan each day's paper that day, name each file by trading date, vendor and document number, and, once both conditions are met, still check a sample of each day's images for legibility before discarding that day's originals.

For records that exist only in a system, Publication 583 says a computerized system must be able to produce sufficient legible records to support and verify entries made on your return, and its machine-sensible records must reconcile with your books and return and provide enough detail to identify the underlying source documents. Publication 583 adds that you must keep all machine-sensible records and a complete description of the computerized portion of your recordkeeping system, showing the functions performed as data flows through the system, the controls for accurate and reliable processing and against unauthorized addition, alteration or deletion of retained records, and the charts of accounts with detailed account descriptions. So export each day's point-of-sale reports and transaction data into its folder, with the complete description Publication 583 requires of your point-of-sale and accounting setup, covering every item listed above; Publication 583 points to Revenue Procedure 98-25 for more. How long each record must be kept is a separate question.