Accounting software for restaurants in UAE that keeps food cost and VAT in view

Generic charts lump everything into “cost of sales”. A restaurant needs to see food, beverage and packaging separately, because each moves for different reasons. HelloBooks starts restaurants with a hospitality layout that you can rename or extend, and you can split it by outlet using classes if you run more than one branch.

• Sales: dine-in, takeaway, delivery-app sales, catering and event orders
• Cost of sales: food purchases, beverage purchases, packaging and disposables
• Delivery-app commission and payment processing fees as separate expense lines
• Kitchen gas, utilities, pest control and kitchen equipment maintenance
• Staff meals and wastage, so they are not hidden inside food cost

Food and beverages in the UAE are standard-rated at 5%, whether eaten in or taken away, so most of your sales lines carry the same treatment. The harder part is the purchase side. A delivery app normally invoices its commission with VAT, and that input VAT is recoverable if you are registered, so the commission bill must be recorded as a bill rather than netted off against your sales. If you book only the net payout, you understate sales and lose the input VAT.

Small cafés should also watch the registration line. Registration becomes mandatory once taxable supplies pass AED 375,000 over the previous 12 months, or are expected to in the next 30 days. A busy kiosk can cross that within its first year.

Photograph a supplier invoice from the meat wholesaler, in Arabic or English, and the agent reads the TRN, line items and VAT, then posts it to food purchases. Upload the end-of-day sales report and it drafts the daily sales journal split by payment method. When the weekly delivery-app statement arrives, it records gross sales, the commission bill and the net payout, then matches the payout to your bank statement upload. HelloBooks does not connect to point-of-sale systems, so the daily figure comes from the report you upload.

You can ask “what was my food cost percentage last week at the Al Barsha branch?” and get the answer from the ledger. You still review unusual entries and approve the VAT return before your accountant files it on EmaraTax.

Most owners watch a weekly P&L by outlet, food cost as a percentage of food sales, and supplier ageing so the vegetable supplier is paid before he stops delivering. A typical example: AED 42,000 of weekly food sales against AED 13,400 of food purchases is a food cost near 32%, and the agent flags it when the figure moves more than two points.

If you want your own outlet structure, a recipe-costing account set or an AI rule that always sends one supplier to beverage purchases, book a call at /book-a-demo or email hello@hellobooks.ai and the team will set it up.