Books that balance.

You define the hierarchy yourself — assets, liabilities, revenue and expenses, with sub-accounts underneath such as bank accounts sitting under assets — using a numbering scheme that matches how you actually run the business, so food, beverage, labour and overhead can be traced separately instead of collapsing into a single line called costs. Postings are double entry: every journal line carries a date, an account, a description and a debit or credit amount, and you can read a figure in a report back to the transaction it came from. What decides whether an amount lands in the right place is the mapping you configure — which POS revenue category posts to which account, which expense code a supplier bill takes. Vertex applies that mapping consistently. Deciding what the correct mapping is in the first place, and revisiting it when you add a revenue stream or open a site, is a judgement for you and your accountant.

Where a bank feed is available for your bank, statement lines are imported and matched against transactions already recorded in Vertex: a card payout against the settlement record, a deposit against the daily sales report, a payment against a vendor bill. Vertex proposes matches with a confidence indicator and shows why it paired them, so lines whose amounts and dates agree are grouped for you rather than hunted through a PDF statement. The word to be careful with is reconciles. Vertex suggests; a person confirms. Each proposed match sits behind a confirm or review step, and anything it cannot pair is left in an open queue for someone to work through. That queue is the honest part of the screen — unreconciled items usually mean something was recorded late, recorded twice, or not recorded at all, and no matching engine can tell you which of those it is. Reconciliation is a control your business performs; Vertex arranges the evidence for it and keeps a record of who confirmed what. Bank feed availability depends on your bank and your region, so please confirm yours with our sales team rather than assuming it.

Bills are captured against the supplier with an invoice reference, a due date, an amount and an expense account, and each one carries a status — paid, pending approval or overdue — so what is owed and what has slipped is visible without opening a folder. Approval routing is configurable, and as with reconciliation the approval is a human act that Vertex records rather than performs: it does not judge whether a price is reasonable or an invoice genuine, it makes sure the bill cannot pass the approval step without someone accountable putting their name to it. Budgets work alongside that. You set targets by account — food cost percentage, labour, rent and utilities — and Vertex reports actual against budget with the variance for the period. Treat a variance as a prompt to go and look rather than a verdict: an overspend against food cost might be a supplier price rise, a portioning problem, a mis-coded invoice or a budget that was set optimistically, and the report will not distinguish between them for you.

Vertex applies the tax rules you configure. You set up the rates and codes your business uses — GST, VAT, local sales or excise taxes — map them to revenue and expense categories, mark categories that are not taxed, and choose whether prices are handled tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive. The ledger then applies that configuration consistently and produces reports from it. What it does not do is make you tax compliant, and any tool that claims to should be treated with suspicion. Vertex does not decide which rate applies to a menu item, whether a supply is exempt, how a mixed inclusive and exclusive pricing model ought to be treated, or what a return has to contain. You will not find a rate, a threshold, a filing date, a retention period or a required invoice format stated anywhere on this page, because all of those are jurisdiction-dependent and change over time — they are configuration, not product defaults. Nor does Vertex monitor rate changes on your behalf: if a rate you use moves, you update it. Determining the correct treatment, keeping the configuration current and filing what is due remains yours to settle with your accountant or tax adviser.

You can produce a profit and loss summary and a trial balance for a selected period, export them and give them to your accountant — that is what the reporting is designed for. Be careful about what those outputs prove. A trial balance marked balanced means the debits equal the credits; it is an arithmetic check, not evidence that transactions were classified correctly, that the period cut-off was right, or that everything which happened was recorded. Cash taken and not entered, an invoice coded to the wrong account, or stock counted loosely will produce statements that balance perfectly and still misstate the business. So the answer to both halves of the question is no. Running Vertex does not make your books ready for an audit, and it is not a replacement for your accountant. What it gives an accountant or auditor is a traceable ledger to work from — journals back to source transactions, bills back to suppliers, reconciliations back to the person who confirmed them — which is the difference between reconstructing your year and reviewing it. Preparing statutory accounts, forming a view on the correct treatment and signing them off is professional work, and it stays with the professional you appoint.