Restaurant Voids and Comps: What to Record, How to Read the Report and What They Cost

Four ways a check loses money

For food cost, the question is whether the kitchen made the item. Some reports leave out items voided before they reached the kitchen — Lightspeed's cancellations report says items "removed from a sale before being sent to a production center are not included" — while a void after the ticket fired is food in the bin. Put those on the waste log too, so the food is counted once and the reason is not lost.

What to record

1. 1.A reason on every void, comp and discount, from a short fixed list: ring-in error, guest changed order, kitchen error, quality complaint, long wait, manager goodwill, staff meal, owner or family. Most systems need the list set up first; Toast's help page notes that "void reasons must be configured in Toast Web before staff can select them on the POS."
2. 2.Who rang it and who approved it. Remove void and comp permissions from server roles so a manager's code is required, or at least above a dollar threshold you set. Toast and Square both set these permissions by role.
3. 3.Whether the kitchen had fired it. A void before firing costs time; a void after firing costs food.
4. 4.Staff meals as rung-in items at a 100% staff discount, not off the books. The food goes out either way; ringing it in is the only way it shows up anywhere but the variance.
5. 5.The time, so the report can separate a comp during service from a void or refund after the check was paid.

What comps add to food cost

Comp reports show menu value. The food cost is the plate cost of the comped dishes, and it sits inside your food cost percentage with no sale behind it.

How comps are booked changes the percentage too. Some books take comps off sales; others keep them in sales at menu price and carry them as a marketing expense; a third moves the plate cost of comps and staff meals out of cost of sales into marketing and employee-meal lines. The same week reads 31.25% if the $640 stays in sales ($7,700 ÷ $24,640). None is wrong, but a switch between them moves food cost without anything in the kitchen changing, so pick one with your accountant and keep it. The inventory count guide shows where the food used comes from.

Reading the weekly report

Sort voids, comps and discounts by reason, by employee and by hour. These patterns deserve a question:

• —Voids or refunds after a check was paid, especially on cash checks.
• —Comps or discounts concentrated on one employee, one shift or one day of the week.
• —Comps with no reason, or the same reason every time.
• —Discounts rung when no promotion was running.
• —A line that rises week after week, even slowly.

A pattern is a question to ask, not proof. A void can be a correction and a comp a good service call; the report is for finding the ones that are neither, and for noticing when a kitchen problem shows up as quality comps. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' own example of a register disbursement scheme is an employee who "fraudulently voids a sale on a cash register and steals the cash" — the reason a void after payment needs an approval rule.

What research shows

The most detailed study we found followed 392 casual-dining restaurants in five chains that adopted a POS monitoring product flagging suspicious transfers, voids and comps by server (Pierce, Snow and McAfee, Management Science, 2015). In the working-paper version, identifiable theft fell 22%, or $24 a week per location, and revenue rose $2,975 a week, about 7% — effects the published abstract says "appear to be primarily driven by changed worker behavior rather than worker turnover." The data came from the vendor, and the alerts caught only the most obvious cases: flagged losses averaged $108 a week against $43,697 of weekly check revenue, "the tip of the theft iceberg" in the authors' words.

The ACFE's Occupational Fraud 2026 report includes 53 food service and hospitality cases with a median loss of $100,000; register disbursement schemes, such as false voids, appeared in 6% of them and skimming in 15%. These are the largest cases fraud examiners investigated, not a sample of restaurants, and the report warns that its industry counts do not "necessarily indicate whether fraud is generally more common in one industry compared to another." Figures such as "75% of employees steal" or theft at "4% of sales" circulate widely; we could not trace either to a primary source, so this guide does not use them.

Staff meals and tax

For payroll, IRS Publication 15-B says meals "you furnish to a restaurant or other food service employee during, or immediately before or after, the employee's working hours are furnished for your convenience," so their value can be left out of wages when they are eaten on your premises; meals on an employee's day off cannot. The deduction side changed for amounts paid after 2025, with "specific, limited exceptions for certain industries and for meals provided by restaurants," so ask your accountant how your staff meals are treated.

Marji does not import POS reports, so voids and comps stay in your POS. What it adds is the plate cost of each dish — the number that turns a comp report at menu value into food cost.