Quick service / counter / Accounting and back office
Accounting and back office for quick-service restaurants
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
A single counter site is almost always better off on QuickBooks Online, mainly because a bookkeeper who already knows it will set up your daily sales journal faster than you will learn a restaurant-specific system from scratch. Restaurant365 is built and marketed specifically for multi-unit and franchise operators who need consolidated reporting across sites, which is a different buyer entirely.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 11 August 2026
Step 3
What matters most to you?
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner overall
QuickBooks Online
The generalist accounting package everyone's bookkeeper already knows, with nothing restaurant-specific built in.
The trade-off
August 2026 brought a 41% to 70% price rise on the Plus and Advanced tiers with nothing new added to justify it.
Why it won
- price
- ease of setup
- support
- volume
- integrations
Our scores, 1 to 5, defined on the methodology page.
Everything else, ranked the same way
| # | Product | From | Contract | Card rate | Score | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | QuickBooks Online The generalist accounting package everyone's bookkeeper already knows, with nothing restaurant-specific built in. | From $38 | none, cancel any time | separate QuickBooks Payments account, rates quoted individually | 3.2 | Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026 |
| 02 | Restaurant365 Restaurant-specific back-office software built for people running five or more sites, priced accordingly. | On request | multi-year is typical | not applicable | 3.2 | Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for quick service / counters
The wrinkle general accounting software was not built for is the daily sales journal: card, cash, tips, sales tax and comps all landing in the right accounts every night without someone manually re-keying a POS report. Get that one entry mapped correctly and QuickBooks handles the rest of a single counter's books without much friction.
QuickBooks Online runs $38 to $140 a month depending on tier, and prices rose sharply in August 2026 with no new features attached to the increase, worth knowing before you commit to a plan above Simple Start. What it will not do is give you food cost against sales in real time, or consolidate reporting across more than one site without stepping up to Advanced.
Restaurant365 solves both of those, and it explicitly markets to franchise brands as a segment, which fits multi-unit quick-service operators well. It has no published price on its own site; expect a sales call, and third-party figures put the entry tier around $499 a location a month before implementation, which runs $2,000 to $10,000-plus. That is the right cost for someone consolidating several units and the wrong one for a single counter.
Questions people actually ask
- At what unit count does Restaurant365 start to make financial sense?
- There is no fixed number the vendor publishes, but the pricing and implementation cost only pencil out once you are consolidating reporting across several sites rather than running one register.
- Can QuickBooks handle franchise royalty reporting?
- It can be configured to, with the right chart of accounts, but it is not built for it the way Restaurant365 is. For a single franchisee unit it is usually still the simpler choice.