Restaurant edition

A restaurant's books break in the same four places every time.

Clavé Books is double-entry bookkeeping and a real monthly close, operated by a CPA firm, in an edition built around those four. They are the ones a bank feed cannot see and a bookkeeper working from statements will never catch.

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What it does

It reads the till, not the bank statement.

Everything below comes off your point of sale, your invoices and your payroll — the places the money actually happened.

Sales

Every channel, with its own tax treatment

Counter, delivery apps, catering and gift cards. Marketplace orders arrive net of commission and have to be reported gross — that single difference moves a sales tax return every month, and nothing on a bank statement shows it.

Two returns, one set of dollars

Sales tax and resort tax, reconciled to each other

Florida, the county surtax and a city resort tax run on different bases over the same sales. Every worksheet maps line by line to the return it supports, so whoever files it is copying, not deciding.

Before the month closes

Food cost, split into price and portion

Theoretical, ideal and actual, side by side. The gap between them separates what your vendors did from what your kitchen did — which turns “food cost is up” from a complaint into one of two specific conversations.

Every close

Statements, worksheets, and what to do about them

A rounded set of financials, the working papers behind them, and a memo naming what changed and what it costs. Cross-checked before it prints: if the three statements do not tie, the pack does not go out.

And the operator's side

A ledger is a record. An operator needs a report that arrives while the week can still change.

Daily

The flash

Yesterday's sales, labor and food on one line a day, with the week's prime cost. It shows theoretical food and says so — purchases are not usage, and a food cost computed off a Thursday delivery is a number that trains people to stop reading the report.

Per invoice

What your vendors did

Price movement tracked on the vendor item and its pack, not the abstract ingredient — so the case that held at $58.00 while the jug went from a gallon to 96 ounces shows up as what it is: a third more per ounce, invisible on the invoice.

Per plate

Menu engineering

What each item costs to build, what it contributes, and which of the four quadrants it sits in — against your own sales mix rather than an industry average.

On the balance sheet

Gift cards, treated as a liability

A card sale is money taken for a meal nobody has eaten. The sales tax is due when it is redeemed, not when it is sold — which is why a shop that books cards as revenue files December and January both wrong.

Where the data comes from

Your point of sale, read properly.

Clavé Books reads Toast exports today — order detail, payments, labor, menu, cash management and gift card balances — and posts them to a real general ledger rather than summarizing them into one deposit line.

Direct integrations with Toast, DoorDash and UberEats are in build. We describe them as in build because that is what they are.

In every edition

Most of the damage we clean up was done by a feature.

No clearing accounts: A clearing account is a promise to sort it out later, and later never comes. There is one suspense account, it is visible, and the close will not run while anything is sitting in it.
No basis switch on a report: Cash and accrual are not a checkbox. Moving between them is a workpaper with a bridge in it, not a toggle above a P&L.
No sub-accounts: Sub-accounts are grouping pretending to be structure. Grouping belongs to the report.
No plug, ever: If a reconciliation does not reconcile, it says so and stops. It does not post the difference to make the screen go green.

Who it is for

One restaurant, or a few, run by the person who signs the checks.

Counter service, full service, a bakery, a bar. If you are on a modern point of sale and the books are three months behind, that is the shape of the problem this was built for.

Not a fit for chains with an internal accounting department, or for anyone who wants software without an accountant attached. Clavé Books is operated, not licensed.