Bookkeeping & Accounting for Restaurants

Last updated: June 2026

Why Restaurants Need Specialized Bookkeeping

Restaurant bookkeeping has to reconcile a POS feed, daily cash and card deposits, three or four delivery aggregators, controlled and direct tips, and 13% HST on prepared food. Miss one piece and a healthy 32% food cost can drift to 38% in three months before you notice. A generalist bookkeeper rarely catches the difference between a Toast gross sales report and the net deposit Square actually wired to your bank.

Ontario Tax Team has worked with restaurant owners, cafes, catering companies, and food trucks across Southern Ontario and the GTA since 1998. Founded by Samer Al-Assali and based at 3148 Sixth Line in Oakville, our team handles the rhythm restaurants actually run on: daily POS reconciliation, weekly food and labour cost reporting, monthly HST returns, and clean year-end books for your T2 corporate return or T2125 personal filing.

If you run a single location, a multi-unit group, or a ghost kitchen out of a shared commissary, you get the same thing: a chart of accounts built for restaurants, a POS-to-bookkeeping sync into QuickBooks Online or Xero, restaurant-aware payroll with WSIB and tip-pool handling, and a quarterly review of prime cost and margin. Call (905) 334-4611 or book a free 15-minute consultation to see how the workflow fits your operation.

Why Restaurant Owners Work With Ontario Tax Team

Ontario Tax Team has supported food service operators across Oakville, Burlington, Milton, and Mississauga since 1998. Samer Al-Assali built the practice around small business owners, and restaurants make up a meaningful share of the book. Our team has set up POS-to-Xero and POS-to-QuickBooks Online pipelines for cafes pulling under CAD $400,000 in annual sales, and for multi-location groups running Toast across three sites.

A few things restaurant clients tell us they came for: a real answer on AGCO and liquor licence reporting, clean WSIB filings for kitchen and front-of-house staff, accurate HST on a catering invoice that mixes hot trays with sealed grocery items, and a quarterly margin report that ties food cost, labour cost, and prime cost back to specific menu categories. We also handle the corporate side. If you incorporate to protect the liquor licence or limit liability on a long lease, your T2 corporate return and shareholder remuneration sit with the same team that does your daily books.

The office is at 3148 Sixth Line in Oakville, and we work with food service clients across Southern Ontario both in person and through a secure cloud workflow. Direct line: (905) 334-4611.