Most restaurant owners spend 5–7 hours per week on billing, writing catering quotes by hand, chasing event deposits, manually tracking vendor invoices. This guide shows you how to automate the most time-consuming parts so you can spend that time doing literally anything else.
| Tool | Price | Best For | Key Restaurant Feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square POS Best All-in-One | Free + processing | Dine-in, takeout, online orders | Auto-receipts, end-of-day reports, tipping |
| Wave Best Free Option | Free invoicing | Catering clients, event billing | Auto payment reminders, recurring invoices |
| FreshBooks | $19/month | Caterers and event restaurants | Deposits, project billing, expense tracking |
| Toast POS | $69+/month | Full-service restaurants | Native catering module, automated POS invoices |
Square for front-of-house transactions (handles receipts and daily reports automatically). Wave (free) or FreshBooks for catering and event invoices. This two-tool combo covers 95% of restaurant billing needs at very low cost.
In Square, go to Dashboard → Settings → Receipts. Enable automatic email or SMS receipts. Enable the Daily Summary Email, you'll get a summary of each day's sales every morning automatically. No pulling reports, no manual entry.
On Toast, go to Back Office → Reports → Scheduled Reports and configure daily, weekly, and monthly reports to email automatically. This alone eliminates 1–2 hours per week of manual reporting.
This is the biggest time-saver for restaurants that do catering and private events. Create a catering inquiry form (free with Typeform or JotForm) collecting: event date, guest count, service type, and contact info. Connect it to Wave or FreshBooks via Zapier, when someone submits the form, a deposit invoice is automatically generated and emailed with a payment link.
In Wave, go to Invoices → Invoice Settings → Automatic Reminders. Configure: 3 days before due date (friendly reminder), on the due date (payment due today), and 3 days after (overdue notice). This alone reduces time spent chasing payments by around 80%. Most clients pay on the first reminder.
FreshBooks has the same feature at Settings → Invoice → Automatic Payment Reminders. Both let you customize the message for each reminder, keep the first one friendly, the overdue one more direct.
Connect your restaurant's business bank account or credit card to Wave's free accounting module. Wave pulls in transactions automatically and categorizes them (food costs, supplies, utilities, etc.). For vendor invoices that arrive by email (Sysco, US Foods, local suppliers), set up a Gmail filter forwarding those emails to your Wave email address, Wave will scan and attempt to log them as expenses automatically.
This isn't perfect, but it gets you 70% of the way there with minimal manual entry. Review and categorize the remaining 30% in your monthly bookkeeping session.
In Wave, go to Reports → Schedule Report. Set up a weekly Profit & Loss email arriving every Monday morning. It shows total revenue, top expense categories, outstanding invoices, and net profit estimate for the prior week.
One Monday morning email, and you know exactly how last week went, before the lunch rush starts. No manual calculation, no pulling dashboards.
Wave invoicing is completely free. Set up your catering automation this weekend and stop chasing deposits by phone.
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