Accounts Setup

A sales journal is only useful once each line points to the right account in your accounting system. This page defines every field a daily sales journal can produce and how to map it, so your exports land in the correct accounts and every entry balances.

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How account mapping works

You set mappings on the Sales Mapping page (see Introduction). For each journal line you choose the account it should post to in QuickBooks (or NetSuite):

• The debit/credit side is fixed per line. Garde decides whether a line is a debit or a credit; you only choose the account it lands in. The side each line uses is listed in the tables below.
• A/P and tax lines also need a linked vendor. For example, Summary: Tax posts to a Sales Tax Payable account and needs the tax agency set as its vendor.
• You can add an optional memo per line to carry a label into the export (for example, tagging each card tender with its network).
• An unmapped line breaks the export. If a line that carries an amount has no account, the entry can’t post — map it in Setup rather than editing the entry.

Your restaurant won’t use every line below. Payment types you never accept simply stay at $0 and can be left mapped to a placeholder.

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Sales and service charges (credits)

These lines record revenue earned, before discounts, tax, or tips.

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Discounts and refunds (debits)

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Tax, tips, and gratuity (credits)

These are money you collect on behalf of someone else — the tax authority or your staff — so they post as liabilities, not revenue.

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Gift cards

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Payment tenders (debits)

Each tender line is the total money collected by that method for the day — sale, tax, tips, and gratuity combined. It debits the cash or receivable account where that money lands. Only the tenders you actually accept will carry amounts.

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Timing adjustments

These lines keep the books right when a payment and the order it belongs to fall on different days.

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Cash reconciliation

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Understanding Cash Adjustments and Cash Rounding Difference

Together, these two lines make Tender Total: Cash equal the actual physical cash the restaurant collects — not the theoretical cash total from the POS. Most restaurants don’t hand out coins, so what lands in the drawer and the bank deposit is an adjusted, rounded number. These lines absorb the difference so the journal still balances against gross sales. Here’s the sequence Garde uses:

1. Start with raw cash from sales — Toast’s Total cash payments.
2. Apply Cash Adjustments — cash that left (or entered) the drawer for non-sale reasons: payouts, tip-outs, manual adjustments. This gives the net cash that should be in the drawer.
3. Round to the denomination actually collected — usually whole dollars, since coins aren’t handed out. The result becomes Tender Total: Cash, the real deposit debited to Cash on Hand.
4. Cash Rounding Difference captures the leftover cents so the entry stays balanced.

Both lines post to your Over / Short account, so any gap between theoretical and actual cash collects in one place you can monitor. Worked example — using the journal from Double-Check Against Toast: Here the net cash already landed on a whole dollar, so there’s no rounding remainder. When it doesn’t — say net cash works out to $103.47 but the restaurant only deposits $103.00 — the 47¢ gap posts to Cash Rounding Difference, and Tender Total: Cash shows the $103.00 actually collected.

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Example chart of accounts

Every restaurant’s chart of accounts is a little different, but the sales journal only needs a handful of accounts to post cleanly. Here is a minimal set that covers every line above, along with the account type each one should use in QuickBooks.

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Example mappings

Using the accounts above, here is how a typical restaurant maps each journal line. Group similar tenders onto the same account — every card network can share one CC Receivables account, and every third-party delivery tender can share one Third Parties Online Receivables account.