Why your Toast says $8,400 but your bank says $7,612

You sold $8,400 yesterday. Two days later, the deposit hits your bank. It’s $7,612.

Where did the $788 go? Most owners shrug, trust one number or the other, and move on. The books end up wrong. Three months later, when you’re trying to figure out why margins are tight, the answer is sitting in $788 a day worth of stuff that never got recorded.

Here’s the thing though. The gap is normal. Your POS (the system that rings up the sale) and your bank account are showing two views of the same transactions, on different timelines, with different deductions. They were never going to match. The job of clean books is to track what’s in between.

The gap, broken out

Every restaurant’s gap is some combination of five things:

Card processing fees. The card processor takes their cut before the money reaches you. Usually 1.5 to 3.5 percent of card sales. On a busy night, that’s a few hundred dollars.

Tips your servers walked home with. When servers cash out their credit card tips at the end of the night, that cash leaves the drawer. The POS still recorded it as part of the sale. It’s not your money. It never was. But it has to come out of the deposit somewhere.

Third-party delivery commissions. DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub. They keep 15 to 30 percent of the order before they pay you. So a $400 night on DoorDash might only deposit $280 a few days later.

Refunds, chargebacks, held batches. Friday’s $89 disputed dinner shows up days later as a deduction. Some processors hold a batch 24 to 72 hours before depositing. So Friday’s sales might not land in the bank until Monday.

Cash you haven’t deposited yet. Yesterday’s $400 in cash sales is sitting in the safe, waiting for someone to walk it to the bank.

Stack all that up and the $788 makes sense.

A real example

Let’s say yesterday looked like this.

The numbers above are illustrative, but every line is real money with a real explanation. None of it has anything to do with sloppy books or someone stealing. It’s just how restaurant payments work.

Why this matters

If your bookkeeper just records the bank deposit as “Sales,” your books will tell you a story that is not true.

Your real revenue is wrong. Your fees are invisible. Your delivery margin is wrong because the commissions never hit the books as expense. Your sales tax is calculated off a number that does not match your POS.

Three months later, when you ask “why are margins tight,” the honest answer is “we don’t actually know what your margins are.” That’s a bad place to be.

It also creates a sleeper sales tax problem. State auditors compare what you remitted to what your POS shows you sold. If those numbers do not tie, you will find out the hard way 18 to 24 months from now, with penalties attached.

The fix is a weekly ritual

The cleanest way to handle the gap is to stop trying to make the bank match the POS. They will not. Instead, build the gap into the books on purpose.

Every day, three things get tracked:

• What the POS said you sold (gross sales)
• What’s expected to settle from each source (card processor, DoorDash, Uber Eats, cash)
• A clearing account that holds the difference until everything works through

A clearing account is just a placeholder bucket on the balance sheet. Money sits there for a couple of days while you wait for it to actually arrive. When it lands in the bank, you move it out of clearing and into cash. When the math is right, the clearing account zeroes out.

If a deposit is short by $20, the clearing account does not zero. That’s a flag. Now you know to look at this week, not three months from now when the trail is cold.

For our restaurant clients, we reconcile the clearing account every Friday. Five minutes if everything is clean. An hour if something is off. Either way, the books stay caught up and the owner gets a P&L (Profit and Loss report) that splits gross sales, processor fees, delivery commissions, and cash tips into separate lines.

Best practices for restaurant operators

A few habits that keep this from becoming a mess in the first place:

• Reconcile the clearing account weekly, not monthly. Catching a $20 gap on Friday is easier than untangling a $400 gap a month later.
• Track each settlement source (Toast, DoorDash, Uber Eats, cash) as its own line on the P&L. Lumping them into “Sales” hides where the money actually came from.
• Pull weekly statements directly from each delivery platform. Don’t rely on the bank deposit alone. The portal has the gross sales, the commissions, and the refunds. The bank only shows the net.
• Make cash deposits the same day you count the drawer. Cash sitting in the safe is a reconciliation problem waiting to happen.
• Reconcile sales tax collected (POS) to sales tax remitted (state filing) every month. The state will compare these eventually. Better to find the gap before they do.

What to ask your bookkeeper

If you’re not sure how your books are set up today, ask three questions:

1. Where do credit card processing fees show up on my P&L?
2. Are DoorDash and Uber Eats commissions tracked as a separate expense, or are my delivery sales just recorded net of fees?
3. How often do you reconcile my POS to my bank?

If the answer to any of these is “I don’t know” or “we just record the bank deposit as sales,” your books are telling you a fiction. The fix is mechanical and not expensive. It just has to get done.

If you want a second set of eyes on yours, send a screenshot of last month’s P&L. We’ll tell you whether the gap is being handled, or whether there is money slipping through the cracks in plain sight.