Toast Best Practices

Toast Menu Setup:

• In Toast, Other Setup, Sales Categories
  • Sales Category names should be identical to Back Office GL names found on Sales page
  • Food, NA Bev, Liquor, Beer, Wine, Retail are the most common names for accounting purposes
  • Do not create duplicate names for Reporting Sales Categories as these will not poll
  • Setting up these Sales Categories in a different manner will make comparison between Toast/RASI more challenging for operators
• All menu items MUST have a Reporting Sales Category assigned to them in order for the sale to poll to Back Office.
• All PLU numbers are created by Back Office & do not poll from Toast.
  • Modifiers do not poll into the Back Office PMIX reporting and will not have a PLU generated for Menu Engineering purposes. Modifiers must be set up as individual items under a "modifiers' sales category in Toast to generate a PLU

Toast Employee Setup: 

• Employees must be assigned a job code and a payrate in Toast in order to poll.
  • If they clock in without either, the employees hours will need to be manually added to payroll
• Employee ID field in Toast will not poll to Back Office. Back Office uses system-generated POS ID numbers to match employees to their hours from Toast.
  • Setup employees in Toast and Back Office on the day they are hired
  • POS ID for polling will be generated in Back Office the next day
  • Enter POS ID into Back Office Employee profile
  • A list of all POS IDs can be found by navigating to Report Card -> Employee Reports -> Employee Information
• Best Practice is to give dummy users (i.e. Bar Terminal, FOH Training) and salaried employees zero dollar pay rates
  • If there are payrates assigned to these users, their hours will need to be deleted from the POS and you will need to repoll the pay period prior to beginning payroll.
  • Back Office reports are still able to show zero rate clock-ins if ever necessary

Toast Discount Setup:

• Discounts will be mapped to GL's in Back Office with consideration for compliance and use tax implications
  • Consider clear naming conventions for proper use by staff
  • Important distinctions
    • Whether food, alcohol or carbonated beverage is being discounted
    • Whether the comp is for an employee, owner, to build business, or resolve a customer issue
    • Whether 100% of the item is being comped

Toast Online Setup:

• If you enable Toast Future Orders allowing guests to pay for an order that will be picked up in the future, please reach out to your Back Office team.
• Your Back Office Accountant will create a Liability GL on Balance Sheet for Toast Future Orders, With Debit & Credit lines on the Back Office Sales Page

Toast Refunds:

• If refund is due to Prepaid Order cancellation
  • Refund amount from Toast will be manually entered as a Debit to Toast Deposit Sales Collected
  • Refund amount from Toast must be manually subtracted from polled credit card tender totals on the RASI Sales Page
• If refund is due to other reasons (customer complaint, incorrect charge, chargeback, etc...)
  • Refund amount from Toast will be manually entered as a Paid Out to GL 5320 Bad Debt Expense
  • Refund amount from Toast must be manually subtracted from polled credit card tender totals on the Back Office sales page.

Toast Credit Card Deposits & Fees:

• If credit cards and fees are not processed by Toast before the scheduled poll time, they will not poll to Back Office. Repolling should be completed after credit cards are processed to bring this data into Back Office. Once you have repolled, please audit both your credit card deposit line and your CC processing fee line for accuracy prior to submitting.
• Credit card payments with the status of “capture_in_progress” in Toast do not poll as we do not know if the payments were successful. Generally repolling a day later will pick up the payments once they are completely processed. In the Toast portal, the Deposit Sales Collected detail allows the user to see payments collected outside the date range for orders in the date range.
• Credit card and credit card fee amounts on future days can cause discrepancies that will manually need to be adjusted in Back Office. This is common for prepaid future orders.