Union Square Donuts
The short version is on LinkedIn: twenty hours, then eleven, then five. This is the longer version — what the close actually consists of, and what runs each part of it.
5 hours — July close
Nine locations. Full financials plus the meals tax filing.
The problem
Nine locations on two different point-of-sale systems. Cash counted by hand at every store. Tips owed across both systems, split by hours worked. Card spend arriving as receipts in a shoebox. A meals tax filing with its own deadline. None of that is hard — it's just a lot of small, exacting work that only one person knew how to do, and it all landed in the same week.
The instinct is to buy something. But a nine-location food business doesn't fit the software built for it, so the real fix was to stop moving data between systems by hand.
What runs the close now
by stepSquare data becomes a balanced, QuickBooks-ready journal entry — locations rolled up to classes, categories mapped to revenue accounts, cash split from card settlement, service charges and over/short booked. square-sales-sync
The Toast location reports separately — orders, gross, discounts, net, tax and tips by day, with a tender breakdown that ties out. fenway-payout-summary
Reconciled daily instead of at month end. Staff count the drawer, the app compares it to what Square says should be there, and a variance past tolerance has to be explained before it's submitted. Month end inherits no mysteries. Cash Deposit app
Pulled from Square and Toast, pooled, and split across employees by hours worked — then tied out across both systems so the two agree before anything is paid. Tips Payout app · tips-reconciliation-usd
Coded and synced into QuickBooks with receipts already attached, so there is no month-end chase. Ramp
The ADP package becomes a departmental journal entry plus QuickBooks import files, and the accrual at month end. payroll-je
Cash collected but not yet banked, and card payouts that settle after the month closes — two separate reconciliations that used to be a spreadsheet each. month-end-deposits-in-transit
Additions, disposals, depreciation, and the tie-out back to the general ledger. depreciation-scheduler
A fully-loaded P&L by location, with commissary and overhead allocated to the stores that drive them — then the closed month rolls into the three-statement model. location-pnl-allocations · usd-projection-update
What's left for a person
My role quietly changed from preparer to reviewer. I'm hunting the 10% that's wrong instead of keying in the 90% that's right.
Roughly 90% of the entries now prepare themselves, which means the five hours are spent almost entirely on judgment — checking that the allocation methodology still reflects how the business actually runs, chasing the exceptions the reconciliations flag, and deciding whether the numbers tell a story anyone would act on. None of that got automated. It just stopped competing for time with data entry.
Nothing about the business got simpler along the way. Nine locations is still nine locations. What changed is that the systems talk to each other, so nobody has to be the integration layer between them.
The short version, written up on LinkedIn — 82,702 impressions, 101 reactions, 37 comments. There's also a 60-minute walkthrough of the forecasting side of it.