Comps and voids are two fundamentally different transactions, and they need to be handled differently in your books. Getting them mixed up throws off your revenue numbers and makes your food cost percentages unreliable.

A void is a correction. It happens before a transaction is finalized, like when a server rings in the wrong item or accidentally doubles an order. The transaction gets canceled before it completes. Since the sale never actually happened, it should never touch your revenue. Your POS system should remove it entirely as if the entry never existed. If voids are somehow showing up as negative revenue in your books, something is set up wrong.

A comp is a completed sale where you chose not to charge the customer. The food was prepared and served, but you gave it away for a reason. Maybe a guest had a bad experience, maybe you’re comping a regular, or maybe there was a quality issue with the dish. The cost of that food is real because you used inventory to make it. So comps need to be recorded.

The right way to handle comps in your accounting is through a contra-revenue account. This is a separate account that sits under your gross revenue and reduces it. Instead of deleting the sale or pretending it didn’t happen, you record the full sale and then record the comp against it. This gives you visibility into how much you’re actually giving away. If your comp percentage is climbing month over month, you want to catch that early. Good restaurant bookkeeping will show comps as their own line item on your P&L between gross sales and net sales so the number is always visible.

Your POS system should generate separate reports for comps and voids. Most modern systems like Toast, Square for Restaurants, and Clover track both and can break them down by server, reason code, and time period. Require managers to enter a reason for every comp and void. Without reason codes you can’t distinguish legitimate corrections from potential theft or habitual errors.

Daily reconciliation is where everything comes together. At the end of each shift or each day, compare your POS sales report to your actual cash and card receipts. The comp total should match what your managers authorized. The void count should be reasonable for the volume of business you did. A server with an unusually high void rate needs a conversation, not because they’re necessarily doing something wrong, but because the pattern needs an explanation.

For your food cost calculations, comps matter more than most owners realize. The food was used whether or not you charged for it. If you’re tracking food cost as a percentage of revenue, comps that aren’t properly recorded will make your food cost percentage look artificially high. You’ll think you have a purchasing or waste problem when the real issue is that you’re giving away more food than you thought.

Keep your categorization consistent. If one manager records a comp as a discount and another records it as an expense, your reports become meaningless over time. Create a written policy for how comps and voids get entered in the POS and how they flow into your accounting software. This is one of those areas where working with someone who handles small business bookkeeping in the Bronx and understands restaurant operations can save you a lot of headaches, because the POS data needs to translate correctly into your financial statements every single month. The numbers are only useful if they’re recorded the same way every time.