Chart of accounts templates for hospitality
Six charts of accounts, built for the way these businesses actually make and spend money. A bar that tracks one Beverage line cannot calculate pour cost. A promoter with a flat expense list cannot settle a show. Each of these fixes a specific broken report.
The hotel chart follows USALI, the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry. The restaurant chart follows USAR. Every account carries a plain-English note on what belongs in it.
Download a template
Pick your business type and format. The file downloads immediately.
FormatDownload the restaurant chartNo email required. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers.
The problem
A generic chart of accounts hides the number you need
Most of these businesses run on the default chart their accounting software shipped with, or one a bookkeeper adapted from a retail store. It produces a clean-looking profit and loss statement that cannot answer the question the operator actually has.
- 01
One Beverage line
Liquor, beer and wine have sharply different margins, and draft beer behaves differently from packaged. Collapsed into one account, pour cost is not a number you can calculate, it is a number you guess.
- 02
One Food Cost line
A single delivery can carry produce, dairy, seafood and dry goods. Coded as a lump sum, a supplier price increase on proteins disappears into the average and stays there until someone reads a quarterly report.
- 03
No departments
A hotel without USALI departmental splits cannot say whether rooms or food and beverage carried the month, and cannot be compared against any other property, because everyone else reports departmentally.
- 04
Pass-through booked as revenue
An agency that runs client money through its own revenue line overstates its size, sometimes by a multiple. That distorts everything downstream, from commission math to what the business is worth.
The templates
Six charts, each built for one kind of business
Every template downloads as CSV or Excel with no email required. Columns are account code, name, parent account, type, and a note on what belongs in the account.
Food cost is split by purchasing category rather than landing in one bucket, so theoretical cost can be checked against actual.
Bar chart of accounts
Liquor, beer and wine are separate accounts, and draft is split from packaged, because a single Beverage line cannot produce a pour cost.
Nightclub chart of accounts
Bottle service, door revenue, DJ fees, and promoter and host commissions each get their own line instead of being buried in operating expenses.
Departments are separated the way USALI requires, so departmental profit is a real number and the property can be benchmarked against others.
Event promoter chart of accounts
Guarantees, the split point and promoter profit exist as real accounts, so a show can actually be settled rather than estimated.
Talent agency chart of accounts
Client pass-through money sits in a liability account instead of revenue, so the agency stops overstating its own size.
What it looks like
The top of the restaurant chart
Headings and their immediate children, from the restaurant template. Every account carries a description, and a third level of detail sits underneath most of these in the file.
| Code | Account | Type | What belongs here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4000 | Revenue | Income | Sales by revenue centre, following the USAR Sales (4000) series. |
| 4100 | Food Sales | Income | Gross food sales before discounts and comps. |
| 4200 | Non-Alcoholic Beverage Sales | Income | Soft drinks, coffee, tea, juice and bottled water. |
| 4300 | Liquor Sales | Income | Spirits and cocktails. |
| 4400 | Beer Sales | Income | Bottled, canned and draft beer. |
| 4500 | Wine Sales | Income | Wine by the glass and by the bottle. |
| 4700 | Catering and Banquet Revenue | Income | Off-premise catering, private dining and banquet room rental. |
| 4750 | Delivery and Off-Premise Revenue | Income | Takeout, curbside and third-party delivery sales, recorded gross of commission. |
| 4800 | Other Operating Income | Other income | Ancillary income outside the main revenue centres. |
| 4900 | Discounts and Comps | Income | Contra-revenue. Promotional discounts, employee meals sold and manager comps. |
| 5000 | Cost of Sales | Cost of goods sold | USAR Cost of Sales (5000), split by purchasing category so theoretical cost can be checked against actual. |
| 5100 | Food Cost | Cost of goods sold | Food purchases by major purchasing category. |
| 5200 | Non-Alcoholic Beverage Cost | Cost of goods sold | Soft drinks, syrup, coffee, tea and juice. |
| 5300 | Liquor Cost | Cost of goods sold | Spirits and the consumables that go into a cocktail. |
| 5400 | Beer Cost | Cost of goods sold | Draft and packaged beer, tracked apart because pour cost differs sharply. |
| 5500 | Wine Cost | Cost of goods sold | Wine purchases, including by-the-glass programme stock. |
| 5700 | Paper and Packaging Cost | Cost of goods sold | Takeout containers, cups, lids, bags and delivery packaging. |
| 6000 | Labor | Expense | USAR Labor (6000), held at summary level because payroll rarely arrives as a vendor invoice. |
| 6100 | Management Salaries | Expense | Salaried general, front-of-house, back-of-house and administrative managers. |
| 6200 | Back of House Wages | Expense | Line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers and expeditors. |
| 6300 | Front of House Wages | Expense | Servers, bartenders, bussers, hosts and cashiers. |
| 6500 | Contract and Temporary Labor | Expense | Staffing agencies and leased labor invoiced by a vendor. |
| 6600 | Employee Benefits and Payroll Taxes | Expense | Payroll-related costs carried alongside wages. |
| 7000 | Operating Expenses | Expense | USAR Operating Expenses (7000). Most vendor invoices land here. |
| 7100 | Direct Operating Expenses | Expense | Consumables and services tied directly to running service. |
| 7200 | Music and Entertainment | Expense | USAR Music and Entertainment (7200). |
62 more accounts are in the download, including the third level of detail under each heading.
The full restaurant chart, with all 88 accounts and the third level of detail, is on the restaurant page.
Why we made these
A chart of accounts is a set of instructions for coding invoices
The chart is only worth what the data flowing into it is worth, and in these businesses that data arrives as vendor invoices. A restaurant taking deliveries from a dozen suppliers a week is looking at hundreds of line items that each need to land in the right account. That is the work these templates create, and it is the work Cleo Pay does.
Separate accounts for meat, seafood, produce and dairy
Someone reads each delivery invoice and splits it across those accounts, line by line, instead of coding the total to Food Cost.
Draft beer split from packaged beer
Keg purchases have to be told apart from cases on the same distributor invoice, every time that invoice arrives.
USALI departmental structure
Every vendor bill gets assigned to the department that consumed it, or the departmental profit figures are fiction.
A liability account for client pass-through
Money moving on behalf of a client has to be recognized as pass-through at the moment it is recorded, not corrected at year end.
Cleo Pay reads vendor invoices line by line, codes each line to the account it belongs in, routes the bill for approval, pays it, and posts the result back to QuickBooks Online. The chart you just downloaded is the map. Coding every invoice to it is the part that takes hours a week, and it is the part we take over.
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How bills, approvals and payments sync back to QuickBooks Online.
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Why your restaurant P&L is lying to you
The longer argument for line-item invoice categorization, with sources.
Questions
Chart of accounts questions
What is a chart of accounts?
Do I have to give you my email to download these?
Which format should I take, CSV or Excel?
Can I import these straight into QuickBooks Online?
Do these follow a real accounting standard?
Can I change the accounts?
How detailed should a chart of accounts be?
See your own invoices coded to this chart
Send us a stack of real vendor invoices. We will run them through Cleo, code each line to the chart you just downloaded, and show you the result in QuickBooks.