Introduction

A restaurant owner who has never read a trial balance and an accountant who has never worked a POS meet in this module. This introduction is for both.

The automatic ledger#

Most accounting systems wait for someone to type entries. Here, the entries are produced by the restaurant itself:

• A sale posts revenue and tax the moment it completes.
• A payment posts to the register (cash) or the bank/clearing account (cards) that received it.
• A purchase posts inventory and the supplier's payable.
• The day close posts the day's ingredient consumption — the cost side of everything sold.
• A register close posts the counted cash into the cashier's custody.

Only the genuinely manual — rent, salaries, corrections, owner transactions — is entered by hand, as vouchers.

In this group#

• How Transactions Affect the Ledger — the restaurant day, transaction by transaction, with the accounts each one touches.
• Understanding Debit and Credit — the two words that scare everyone, defused in ten minutes.

Reading this as an accountant#

Everything you expect is here — hierarchical chart of accounts, double-entry postings, voucher discipline, trial balance, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow. What may be new is how much posts without you: treat the system-generated vouchers as your source documents, and spend your time where judgment lives — reviews, approvals, closings and the manual entries.