One truck, forty small businesses
The unit of account for a mobile food business is the event, not the month. A Saturday festival with a percentage-of-sales deal, a Wednesday office park with a flat pitch fee and a catered rehearsal dinner are three different businesses that happen to share a truck, and the books should keep them apart from the first entry. We tag every sale in Square by location or event, so the sync into QuickBooks Online arrives already sorted.
Organizer deals are where per-event truth usually dies. A festival that takes 20 percent of gross should appear as gross sales and a commission expense, not as the net deposit that hit the bank; a flat vendor fee belongs against that event, not in a general overhead bucket. Recorded that way, the file can answer the only question that matters in October: which bookings earned their spot next year. When you want that question answered formally, event by event, that is Fractional CFO work, and these books are its raw material.
Catering deposits are liabilities, not wins
The catering side runs on deposits taken weeks or months out, and a deposit is not revenue on the day it lands. It sits on the balance sheet as money you owe back until the event happens, and its HST follows its own clock. The full lifecycle looks like this:
| Moment | What the books do |
|---|---|
| Deposit received for an August wedding | Cash up, deposit liability up. No revenue yet, and no HST is due while it sits as a true deposit. |
| Deposit applied to the final invoice | It becomes part of the price: revenue is recognized and 13% HST is due on the full contract. |
| Client cancels, deposit refunded | The liability reverses and the cash goes back. Revenue is never touched. |
| Client cancels, deposit kept | A forfeited deposit is treated as tax-included: 13/113 of it belongs to the CRA, the rest is income. |
Caterers who book every deposit as a sale overstate the spring, understate the summer and remit HST early for no reason. The liability account fixes all three at once.
When the weather cancels the gig
Rain-outs are a normal cost of this business, and the books should show them honestly rather than bury them. A cancelled festival usually leaves you with a vendor fee already paid, product already prepped and no revenue line to absorb either. We record the fee and the spoiled prep against the cancelled event, so the file shows a real loss on a real booking instead of a mysterious dip in margin.
That record earns its keep twice. It tells you which organizers refund fees when weather kills the day and which do not, which belongs in next season's booking decisions. And if a kept customer deposit offsets the damage, the 13/113 remittance on it is already handled, because the deposit lived in the right account from day one.
The commissary is your rent line
Most GTA health units expect a mobile food business to work out of an inspected commercial kitchen, so commissary rent is the fixed cost that never takes a week off. It is commercial rent, which means it carries 13% HST you recover as an input tax credit, whether you lease a dedicated bay monthly or buy hours in a shared kitchen. Hourly commissary billing should be tracked by what the hours were for, because prep for a catered event is a cost of that event, not general overhead.
Food cost flows the same way. Dext captures the wholesale invoices and the 6 a.m. cash-and-carry receipts, and purchases for a specific booking get tagged to it. The remainder feeds a food-cost percentage for the window menu, watched monthly, because ingredient prices move faster than menu boards do.
Payroll, tips and a month-end that fits the season
Seasonal crews mean payroll that starts in May and ends in October: source deductions, WSIB registration once you have workers, and ROEs issued properly at season end so your people get EI without a fight. Tips on catering invoices that you collect and share out are controlled tips and run through payroll; cash tips your window staff keep are theirs to report. All of it runs inside End-to-End Accounting: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof.
The month-end pack stays short: revenue and margin by event type, food cost percentage, the deposit-liability balance, and cash against the winter runway. Because the same team files the corporate return, year-end starts from balances we already trust, and the deposit HST questions were answered months before the filing deadline.
