What accounting software packages are best for restaurants?

What accounting software packages are best for...

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Hi everyone,

I have a new client keen to manage their own books who is planning to start up a restaurant. Projected turnover around £300k. Software to be integrated with EPOS.

Does anyone have any experience of accounting software that works well for this size of business and industry?

Thank you,

Karen

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By Peter Kilvington
18th Sep 2014 09:38

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I deal with lots of food led pubs and all have EPOS systems and we are talking here ones that cost in excess of £15K to install.

I have yet to come across a system that will talk in a sensible and polite manner to an accounts system.  

The other issue is that although an EPOS system will record sales very nicely it will not reconcile the till for you.  If you do import from EPOS you will import all of the mistakes made by the till operators and spend hours looking for them eg: credit card payments rang in as cash and visa versa, over rings corrected by a scrap of paper in the till draw, it may record cash spent from the till but I bet it is not entered into the EPOS system correctly.  Another good one is the training key that either suddenly loses its special functions or the training season where they could not find the training key (this adds thousands to sales).

I use xero and record the sales from the till reconciliation sheet, all the problems are ironed out on this sheet and it is one journal a week.  If the client wants to know what they have sold the EPOS system is great for this but it is not great for putting data into accounts systems. 

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Replying to lionofludesch:
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By WBKC
18th Sep 2014 10:05

Thank you Peter, that is incredibly helpful advice. Xero would be my first choice but it is useful to know what the restaurant owners/accountants are using. Also - great advice re the EPOS to Accounting system problems of automatic data transfer. Karen

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By BigBadWolf
18th Sep 2014 10:27

Vend or Menumate + Xero

We find that Vend or Menumate for EPOS + Xero work well

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Replying to SpaceDuck:
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By WBKC
20th Sep 2014 16:32

Thank you. That's really helpful

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Replying to SpaceDuck:
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By WBKC
20th Sep 2014 16:33

Thank you. That's really helpful

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By Shirley Brady
18th Sep 2014 10:29

Transfer of sales info to accounts

I used to work for a multi site restaurant business and although there was the facility to transfer automatically from the tills we never used it due to the reasons quoted by Peter. Each day the manager would produce a reconciliation sheet using the z read showing how the sales were converted into cash, cards split by credit & debit, discounts etc. This was then entered by journal into the accounts system on a weekly basis.

Therefore you can choose whatever accounting system you are happy with.

We left the epos system to produce sale mix and other info.

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By GuestXXX
17th Mar 2015 17:22

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