Restaurant books by someone who's actually closed out the register at midnight.
Owner Melody Gerlitz spent over a decade managing restaurants before opening Avenue. She handled the daily cash reconciliation, the tip reporting, the vendor invoices that came in weekly, the payroll runs for kitchen and front-of-house staff, and the phone call to the supplier when a delivery didn't show. Restaurant books aren't theory at Avenue — they're the rhythm she ran on for ten years.
Today that experience is what Avenue brings to restaurant bookkeeping in the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene area. Daily sales reconciliation, tip pooling math, food cost tracking, POS-to-QuickBooks® Online setup — work informed by someone who knows what closing time actually looks like.
Restaurant books aren't generic small-business books.
A bookkeeper who's only handled retail, professional services, or contractors will get the broad strokes right. But the parts that actually matter for a restaurant — tips, daily cash, food cost, the way the POS reports differ from what really happened on the floor — those need someone who's lived it.
Daily cash and POS reconciliation
Cash drawer counts. Credit card batches. Online orders through DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. Each one reports differently, settles on different schedules, and lands in your books with different fee structures. We reconcile every channel to the deposit that actually hit the bank.
Tip reporting and allocation
Tipped wages, tip pools, tip credits — there's a right way to handle each, and the IRS has opinions. We set up tip reporting in QuickBooks® Online so your payroll runs clean, your tip allocations are documented, and your year-end W-2s reflect what your team actually earned.
Food cost and prime cost tracking
If you don't know your food cost percentage, you don't know your margins. We categorize COGS so your P&L tells you what your kitchen is actually spending — which is the number you need to manage prep, pricing, and waste before they eat your bottom line.
POS-to-QuickBooks® Online setup
Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, Aloha — each POS has its own integration with QuickBooks® Online, and each one needs configuration to map sales categories, payment methods, tax, and tips correctly. We do the setup once so daily data flows clean from there forward.
A decade managing restaurants. Now running the books for them.
Before Avenue, Melody spent over a decade in restaurant management. She did the work that bookkeeping later turns into entries — counting cash drawers at midnight, calling vendors about short deliveries, running payroll for the kitchen and the front, handling the calls from the bank when a deposit didn't look right.
That history shows up in how she handles restaurant clients. Tip pools aren't a textbook concept — she ran them. Food cost isn't a line on a P&L she's read about — she watched it swing with seasonality, supplier price hikes, and the line cook who over-portioned.
Avenue's team reads restaurant numbers operationally, not just as line items. A weird food cost swing isn't just a number off — it could be the new vendor, portion drift, or a supplier hike. We tell you which.
Spokane and Coeur d'Alene have a real restaurant scene. From the Perry District and Kendall Yards in Spokane to the CdA lakefront and the Sherman Avenue corridor, independent operators are building real businesses — most of them juggling the books along with everything else.
Restaurant bookkeeping at Avenue is set up to handle different configurations — single-location cafes, multi-location concepts, full-service dining rooms, takeout and delivery operations. The bookkeeping structure changes for each, but the principles don't: clean daily reconciliation, accurate tip and payroll handling, and a P&L you can actually use to run the business.
Tax season prep gets handed clean to your CPA. No mess to untangle in April.
The bookkeeping structure your restaurant needs.
All a la carte. Pick what fits your operation right now.
QuickBooks® Online Setup
Chart of accounts, bank connections, reporting — set up to match how your business runs.
Monthly Bookkeeping
Every month: accounts reconciled, transactions categorized, financials delivered. No chasing.
Financial Statements
P&L and balance sheet, monthly or quarterly — built for CPA handoff at tax time.
Accounts Payable
Bills paid on schedule. Nothing slips through.
Accounts Receivable
Invoicing handled. Outstanding payments followed up.
Payroll Services
QuickBooks® Online Payroll — direct deposit, tax payments, quarterly filings.
Bookkeeping Cleanup
Behind on your books? Whether it's a few months or a few years, we catch you up.
QuickBooks® App Integration
Connect your other tools to QuickBooks® Online — stop typing the same data twice.
Restaurant-experienced. Locally based. Personally accountable.
Avenue Bookkeeping serves small businesses across Spokane, Spokane Valley, and Coeur d'Alene. Restaurants are one of the few verticals where our owner has direct operational experience from inside the industry.
Books run in QuickBooks® Online. A la carte pricing — pick what you need. Free phone call to start.
“Clean books. Clear numbers. No surprises.”