Restaurant accounting software where the POS is the ledger.
Most restaurant POS systems hand you a report at month end and leave the books to someone else. Nonari is the POS and the books: every order posts as it rings — food and drink to revenue, ingredients out of stock by recipe, tips and service charge to the accounts they belong in — and each outlet keeps its own profit and loss.
Tables, tabs and split bills
Open a tab per table, add courses as they come, settle across several guests and payment methods — one posting per settlement.
Plate cost from the recipe
Every dish is a bill of materials. Ringing the order consumes the ingredients, so the cost of sales and the margin per dish are real.
Tips and service charge, correctly
Tips are a liability owed to staff, not revenue; service charge goes where your policy says. Both post automatically at settlement.
A restaurant has three postings that generic tools get wrong.
The first is tips. Cash and card tips collected at the table belong to staff; booked as sales they inflate revenue and get taxed as yours. The second is service charge, which is revenue in some places, a staff distribution in others, and taxable or not depending on where you are — it needs its own account, not a line inside food sales. The third is cost. A plate of pasta is not a stock item; it is 90 grams of pasta, 60 of sauce, 20 of parmesan and a pinch of labour, and until the sale consumes those ingredients the food cost percentage on the wall is a guess.
General-purpose accounting software receives a daily total and cannot tell any of these apart. Restaurants end up with a POS report, a tips spreadsheet, an inventory count once a month and a bookkeeper reconstructing food cost from purchases. Nonari posts each of the three at the moment of settlement, per outlet, with the recipe doing the stock arithmetic.
- Tips posted to a liability and paid out weekly; never mixed with sales
- Service charge to its own account per outlet, configured once
- Recipe-based consumption so cost of sales and margin per dish are true every day
- Cashier and waiter shifts with counted drawers and a variance per person
- Per-outlet profit and loss, consolidated for the group
Table 7 settles, and five accounts move at once.
The bill is $86: $80 of food and drink plus a 7.5% service charge of $6. The guest leaves a $10 tip in cash. One settlement posts $96 into the drawer, $80 to food and beverage sales, $6 to the service-charge account and $10 to tips payable. At the same moment the recipes behind the four dishes on the tab consume $26 of ingredients from stock into cost of sales, so the table’s gross margin — $54 on $80 — is known before the waiter clears the plates.
On Friday the tips-payable balance is paid out to staff by shift, and the drawer is counted against what the ledger expects. If the count is short, the variance is posted against the shift, not lost in "cash sales".
From recipe to menu engineering.
Define each dish once as a bill of materials — ingredients and quantities, optionally a labour minute cost. Every order consumes those quantities at the ingredient’s weighted-average cost, wastage is written off with a reason, and the menu report ranks dishes by margin and volume. That is the difference between a food cost percentage you calculate quarterly and one you read every morning.
Menu in, tills live, a week of parallel running.
Import the menu with prices and recipes, ingredients with opening stock at cost, and suppliers with open bills. Each outlet becomes a branch with its own drawers and kitchen display. Set the service-charge and tips policy per outlet. Run the tills alongside the old system for a week, compare the daily close, then cut over.
- Menu items with prices; recipes as bills of materials (CSV)
- Ingredients with opening quantity and cost; suppliers with open bills
- Outlets as branches; drawers as shifts; staff invited (unlimited users)
- Delivery platforms set up as customers so their payouts reconcile to orders
What the restaurant edition includes.
Tables, tabs, kitchen display
Open a tab per table, items flow to the kitchen screen as they are entered, courses fire in order, tabs settle with one or many tenders.
Recipe-based costing
Dishes as bills of materials. Orders consume ingredients automatically; wastage write-offs in one click with a reason code.
Tips and service charge
Tips to a staff liability, paid out per shift or week. Service charge to its own account, configurable per outlet.
Split bills and mixed tender
One tab settled across several guests, several payment methods and several receipts, posted as one balanced entry.
Shifts and daily close
Waiter and cashier shifts with counted drawers, variance per person, sales by hour, by item and by server.
Multi-outlet
Each outlet has its own menu, staff, drawers and P&L; the group sees the consolidated view without a spreadsheet.
Nonari vs generic accounting software for a restaurant
Two plans. Every feature on both.
One location, one company
Up to 3 locations, +$32 each after
Unlimited users on both. 15-day free trial, no card. See the full pricing page.
Frequently asked.
What is the best accounting software for a restaurant?
One where the POS posts straight into the ledger, so tips, service charge and plate cost are recorded at settlement rather than reconstructed monthly. Check for recipe-based costing, tips handled as a liability, counted drawers per shift and per-outlet P&L. Nonari does all of that on one double-entry ledger; a standalone POS plus generic accounting software needs a sync and a bookkeeper in between.
How do I account for tips in a restaurant?
Tips belong to staff, so they are a liability, not revenue: debit the drawer or card clearing, credit tips payable at settlement, then debit tips payable when you pay them out. Booking tips as sales overstates revenue and your tax. Nonari posts the liability automatically and shows the payable per shift.
How does recipe costing work?
Each dish is a bill of materials listing ingredients and quantities. When the order rings, those quantities leave stock at the ingredient’s weighted-average cost and post to cost of sales, so gross margin per dish and the food cost percentage are true daily. Wastage is written off separately with a reason.
Can it handle delivery platforms?
Each platform is a customer. Orders can be imported from the platform’s report today and the payout, net of commission, is matched against them so the commission posts as an expense rather than vanishing from revenue. Platform orders come in by import rather than a live API connection, which keeps the commission visible as an expense instead of buried in a net payout.
Does it work for a group with several outlets?
Yes. Each outlet is a branch with its own menu, staff, drawers and profit and loss, consolidated at the group level. Basic covers one outlet; Pro covers up to three, with more added on.
How much does restaurant accounting software cost?
Nonari is $29 a month for one outlet and $70 a month for up to three, POS included, unlimited users, 15-day free trial with no card. Restaurant POS systems alone commonly cost more per terminal, before the accounting subscription.
Ring one table and read the margin.
15-day free trial, no card. Load a few dishes with recipes, settle a tab with a tip, and see tips, service charge and plate cost land in the right accounts.