# PlateBooks

> Double-entry bookkeeping software for independent restaurants. Keeps a real
> general ledger, imports bank statements and receipts, syncs point-of-sale and
> delivery revenue, files payroll registers including employer tax, costs
> recipes to the portion, and reports food cost, labor cost and prime cost
> derived from the journal.

PlateBooks runs in the browser at https://www.platebooks.app/. The books
themselves live behind a sign-in at /app and are not public.

## What makes it different

- **Real double-entry.** Every transaction posts a balanced journal entry.
  Reports are derived from the journal at read time rather than stored as
  summary figures, so the trial balance, profit and loss, and balance sheet
  cannot drift apart from the entries beneath them.
- **Arithmetic decides what files.** A receipt is checked against its own
  printed subtotal and total before anything posts. A transcription that does
  not reconcile is held for review rather than filed, so a misread digit does
  not reach the ledger unnoticed.
- **Restaurant-shaped chart of accounts.** Food and beverage, cleaning and
  supplies, occupancy, front- and back-of-house labor, employer payroll tax,
  card-processor clearing, delivery-marketplace clearing, and sales tax as the
  liability it is rather than an expense.

## Capabilities

- **Bank feed** — imports CSV, OFX and QFX. Columns are auto-detected, including
  exports with no header row. Overlapping statement windows de-duplicate;
  OFX/QFX de-duplicate exactly because they carry a bank-assigned transaction
  id (FITID). Vendor rules are learned from how you categorise.
- **Receipts by email** — photograph and forward. Transcribed, arithmetic-checked
  against the printed totals, then split across accounts with sales tax
  allocated per line.
- **Point of sale** — Square sales sync nightly after close, in each
  restaurant's own timezone. Processing fees are booked out of clearing.
- **Delivery channels** — marketplace revenue recognised at the sale and cleared
  when the payout arrives.
- **Payroll** — reads the register a payroll provider produces and posts wages,
  employee withholding, and the employer share of Social Security, Medicare,
  FUTA and state unemployment into its own expense account.
- **Menu and recipe costing** — recipes cost to the portion through sub-recipes
  and yield loss, with plate cost and margin against menu price.
- **Reconciliation checks** — control accounts are tested against what they
  should hold, and anomalies are named with the account and the amount.

## Answers to common questions

**Is it real double-entry accounting?** Yes. Balanced journal entries, reports
derived from the journal.

**Which banks does it support?** Any bank that exports CSV, OFX or QFX. OFX and
QFX are preferred because duplicate detection is then exact.

**Does it connect to Square?** Yes, syncing nightly after close.

**Does it handle payroll tax?** It posts the payroll register including the
employer share, in a separate expense account so labor cost is stated correctly.

**Does it cost menus?** Yes, to the portion, through sub-recipes and yield loss.

**Who can see the books?** Each restaurant's data is isolated at the database
level. Sessions are self-hosted with no third-party auth script on the page;
passkeys are supported alongside passwords.

## For crawlers and agents

- Public and quotable: `/` and this file.
- Never crawl: `/app` (private ledgers) and `/api/` (not documents). Both send
  `X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow`.
- Sitemap: https://www.platebooks.app/sitemap.xml