Restaurant Accounting Lead

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

About This Role

• We're hiring the first Bookkeepers on our Financial Management team — a founding, hands-on role at the intersection of real client bookkeeping and 0-to-1 product building.
• You won't be joining an established practice with a mature playbook; you'll be writing it.
• You'll do the actual books for our earliest restaurant customers while working shoulder-to-shoulder with product and engineering to shape the service, tooling, and workflows that will define how Toast delivers bookkeeping at scale.
• This role is for someone who genuinely likes restaurant bookkeeping — the prime cost, the tip reporting, the multi-location chaos — and who also gets energy from questioning industry norms and building something new rather than maintaining something established.
• Ambiguity here isn't a bug; for the first year or two, it's the job.
• If you're the kind of person who reads a messy set of restaurant books and sees an interesting puzzle — and who'd rather build the recipe than follow one — we'd love to hear from you.

A day in the life

(Responsibilities)

• Own end-to-end bookkeeping for a portfolio of pilot restaurant customers: chart of accounts setup, monthly close, bank/POS reconciliations, accruals, and delivery of clean financial statements.
• Serve as Toast's in-house expert on restaurant-specific accounting — prime cost, COGS, labor and tip reporting, multi-unit consolidation, high-volume daily transaction reconciliation, and multi-jurisdiction sales tax.
• Embed directly with product and engineering, translating real client workflows and pain points into product

requirements

that shape our roadmap — you'll be in the room when we decide what to build next, not just told what shipped.

• Design and document the SOPs, controls, and QA processes a bookkeeping function needs to run reliably — since none of it exists yet, you'll build the foundation others will scale on.
• Work directly with restaurant operators to understand their businesses, set expectations, and deliver a service that earns their trust.
• Help define what "great" looks like for this function as it grows, including future hiring needs, tooling choices, and where automation should (and shouldn't) replace judgment.
• Move fluidly between hands-on bookkeeping work and higher-leverage building work as priorities shift — comfort wearing both hats is essential.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 5+years of bookkeeping experience, with meaningful time spent on restaurant or hospitality clients specifically.
• Deep working knowledge of restaurant accounting mechanics: COGS and prime cost, tip pooling and reporting, multi-location consolidation, and reconciling high-volume POS transaction data.
• Fluency with modern bookkeeping and accounting software, and genuine enthusiasm for adopting new tools.
• Experience building a process or practice from scratch.
• Genuine comfort with ambiguity and undefined scope; you'd rather help define a role than be handed a finished one.
• Strong communication skills — able to translate accounting complexity into plain language for both restaurant operators and internal product/engineering partners.
• Sharp attention to detail and the organizational discipline to manage multiple clients' books accurately and on schedule.

What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Experience at a tech startup, in professional services, or inside an embedded finance / fintech environment.
• Prior exposure to Toast POS or other restaurant management systems.
• Experience working with AI tools (ie - Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.)
• A CPA, CB, or equivalent bookkeeping/accounting credential.

AI at Toast

• At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn.
• We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality.
• We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them.
• The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it's a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

• We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry.
• Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters' changing needs.
• Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits .
• The base salary range for this role is listed below.
• The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location.
• In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits.
• You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy .

Pay Range

$79,000 — $126,000 USD

• How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process
• Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you.
• We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation.
• All hiring decisions are made by people.
• We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance.

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

• We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs.
• Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location.
• Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast
• People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success
• At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive.
• The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast.
• We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.

Apply today!

• Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process.
• As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process.
• If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact [email protected] .

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