One Page for Your Accountant

Your bookkeeper's email arrives on the third of the month: a screenshot of one bank line, $99.00, and a question. What is this for?

You could answer with the pitch. It answers the phone, it takes orders, it pays for itself. That answer comes back in January with a different question: prove it.

What follows is the version that survives January. Four numbers, one division, and the single input that is not on any report.

TL;DR

• Three recovered calls a month at a $38 ticket cover the $99 plan, processing included, with nothing left to argue about.
• At $299 a month the same ticket needs nine calls, which is one busy Friday and part of a Saturday.
• Processing is 2.9% plus 30 cents a charge, so a $38 order costs about $1.40 before the food.
• There is no overage: when a month's minutes run out, calls forward to your own phone and nothing extra is billed.
• Four numbers decide the whole thing, and a test call with your own menu gives you three of them.

What the charge is, before any arithmetic

A phone line that answers while your kitchen cooks. It takes the order the way the caller says it, reads it back, and sends the ticket to the place you already cook from: Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or a receipt printer.

The invoice is flat, which is the part an accountant likes.

Three billing rules belong next to that table. A call under 10 seconds is never billed. No single call bills past 12 minutes. And there is no overage: at the cap, calls forward to your own line instead of being answered, so a heavy month costs what a light one does. The trial is 14 days with no card, so the first invoice may be the first real data point.

The four numbers

Put four lines on the page and nothing else.

Three of the four are facts you can pull. The ticket is on the POS. The subscription is on the invoice. Processing is published. Calls recovered is the one that needs a judgement, so it has to come from a log and not from a feeling, because it is the only input anyone can argue with.

The arithmetic, one row at a time

Take the example row: 40 recovered calls at a $38 ticket.

Forty calls times $38 is $1,520 in orders that did not exist that month without an answered phone.

Processing on those: 40 times $1.40 is $56.

Subscription: $99.

$1,520 minus $56 minus $99 leaves $1,365.

That is before food, and your accountant will take food off it, because you still cooked forty orders. What survives food cost is the point of the line: no second wage, no extra hour of anyone's shift, no new body on the floor at 7:40.

For the conservative column, run the same 40 calls at a $24 lunch ticket. That is $960 in orders, about $40 in processing, $99 in subscription, and $821 left. A smaller ticket carries the same flat fee, which is why the next section matters more than this one.

The number that has to be true

Everything above is arithmetic you can check. The one thing that has to be true is calls recovered.

So turn the sum around. How many calls does the plan need before it pays for itself? Take the ticket, subtract the processing on one order, and divide the subscription by what is left.

At $38: $38 minus $1.40 is $36.60. $99 divided by $36.60 is 2.7, so three calls a month cover Starter. At $299, $299 divided by $36.60 is 8.2, so nine calls cover Unlimited.

At a $24 lunch ticket the line moves down: $23 left per order, and $99 divided by $23 is 4.3, so five calls.

That is the whole case, and it cuts both ways. If your log shows nothing ringing out because the phone is already answered every time, three calls a month is three calls you do not have, and this is not the plan you need. If the log shows thirty, the arithmetic stops being interesting and the only question left is which week to start.

What processing adds, and what it doesn't

Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents on a successful charge, which is about $1.40 on a $38 order. It is not a new cost. Every card at the counter already pays it; the phone changes where the charge happens, not what it costs.

There are two ways a call gets paid, and both use the same rate. A returning caller has a card kept from a previous payment, and it is charged while they are still talking, so the ticket reaches the kitchen during the call. A first-time caller gets a text with a link, the line stays open while they pay, and paying it keeps the card for the next call. A shop that would rather take cards at the counter confirms the order on the call and rings the sale when the customer collects, with no processing until then.

Paid before they hang up walks through which path applies to which caller, and where the money lands.

What to hand over with the page

Three documents and the one-page sum.

1. The invoice. One line: phone answering, monthly.
2. The call log for the same month: calls answered, calls that rang out, minutes used.
3. The ticket report from the POS for the same four weeks.

With those, every input on the page can be checked by someone else, which is the standard an accountant is applying. What they cannot check is whether the calls you counted were going to be orders. That judgement is yours, and it is worth writing one sentence about it next to the number.

The missed call arithmetic is the other half of the story if the question is what an unanswered ring is worth in the first place. And if the question is simply what the two plans cost, the plan page has it in one table. The rest of the phone guides cover the setup side, from the count to the ticket.

FAQ

Final Thoughts

The plan is not the interesting number. Calls recovered is, and it is the only one you have to look up rather than calculate.

Write the four lines down with this month's ticket and last month's call log. If the quotient is smaller than the rings you let go on a Friday, the decision is made before the next invoice arrives.

Kovo is $99 a month for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000, with no overage and no per-order fee. Take a test call with your own menu, count what it answers, and put the real invoice on the page once you have one.