Bookkeeping for restaurants and cafés in Dubai: what to track every month.

A café in JLT or a restaurant in Al Barsha can easily see a few thousand transactions a month. Most of them are small, and most of them are easy to lose. The good news is that F&B bookkeeping follows the same rhythm every month, and once that rhythm is in place, the numbers start to tell you useful things.

1. Reconcile sales every day, not every month

Your point-of-sale report says what you sold. Your card settlements and cash count say what you received. The two should match, day by day. When they do not, the reason is usually a refund, a void, a tip or a card batch that settled the next morning. Finding that on the same day takes minutes; finding it at month end takes hours.

2. Record delivery app sales at their full value

Delivery platforms pay you a net amount, after their commission and fees. The most common mistake we see is recording only that net payout as sales. That understates your revenue and hides what the platform is really costing you.

• Record the full order value as sales.
• Record the commission and fees as an expense.
• Keep each platform's statement for the period, so the figures can be checked later.
• Check the VAT treatment on the commission invoice, so that any VAT you can recover is not missed.

3. Count stock at the same time every month

Food cost is the number that decides whether a restaurant makes money. You cannot know it without a stock count. Count on the last night of the month, at the same time, using the same list. The count does not need to be perfect; it needs to be consistent.

4. Keep every supplier invoice, including the small ones

Fresh produce, bakery and dairy suppliers often deliver daily with a paper invoice. Those invoices are the evidence for the VAT you pay on purchases, and without a proper tax invoice that VAT usually cannot be recovered. A simple habit works: photograph every invoice on the day it arrives and send it to one shared folder.

5. Separate staff meals, wastage and complimentary items

Staff meals, spoiled stock and items given away are real costs. If they are not recorded, your food cost looks worse than it is and nobody can see where the stock went. A daily wastage sheet on the kitchen wall is enough.

6. Payroll, WPS and service charges

Salaries in the UAE are paid through the Wage Protection System, so payroll needs to match what goes through WPS each month. Record overtime, allowances and any service charge shared with staff separately, so labour cost is clear.

The three numbers to watch each month

1. Food cost as a share of food sales.
2. Labour cost as a share of total sales.
3. Prime cost: food and labour together.

Track them monthly and compare them with your own previous months. A sudden rise in food cost usually means waste, theft, a supplier price change or a menu item priced too low, and the stock count tells you which.

Need help keeping F&B books clean?

We keep books for restaurants and cafés across the UAE, with delivery app reconciliation and a monthly report you can read in five minutes. See our bookkeeping services in Dubai.