Restaurant Accounting: Costing, Write-offs and Cash

Taxes in food service

• turnover tax for income up to UZS 1 billion — 4% at the general rate under Article 467 of the Tax Code (the 4/2/1% rates by location apply to retail trade);
• above the threshold — VAT at 12% and profit tax;
• trading without a cash register (CRM) — a fine of UZS 5 million (Article 221);
• a fee for the sale of alcohol by catering businesses (Article 455).

Key areas

Receipt and storage of food, costing of dishes, write-offs based on actual sales, stocktakes, accounting for revenue and settlements with guests.

Staff is a separate topic: shift schedules, turnover and the resulting volume of HR paperwork.

• receipt and storage of food
• recipe cards and costings
• write-offs based on sales
• regular stocktakes
• revenue and cash transactions
• settlements with staff

Where money is most often lost

In discrepancies between the calculated and the actual food stock. If write-off norms do not reflect reality, shortages accumulate unnoticed.

The second source of losses is weak control over cash transactions and refunds.

How to build the accounting

Start with recipes and norms, then set up regular stocktakes and reconciliation of the POS data with the books.

Restaurant accounting works only with discipline on site: without correct data entry in the kitchen, no software will help.

Why the cost of a dish is the key area

In food service, profit is made not at the till but in the kitchen: a gap between the costing and the actual use of food eats into the margin quietly and constantly.

That is why accounting begins with recipes and portion norms. Until they are written down, any cost calculation remains approximate.

• recipe cards and portion norms
• accounting for semi-finished products
• write-off of spoilage and waste
• processing and re-use of food
• stocktakes by food group

Stocktaking as a working tool

In restaurants, stocktakes are needed not once a year but regularly and for key groups. Only then are discrepancies caught while they can still be explained and fixed.

It is useful to compare results between periods: a persistent deviation on one item almost always points to a process problem rather than a one-off error.

Cash discipline and revenue

Revenue in food service arrives in different ways: cash, cards and through delivery aggregators. Each channel needs to be reconciled separately with the actual receipts to the bank account.

Discrepancies with aggregators arise from withheld commissions and refunds — these amounts must be recorded correctly, otherwise revenue is distorted.

Staff and work schedules

Shift schedules, part-time work and turnover make payroll one of the most labour-intensive areas. Errors here are noticed immediately and damage relations within the team.

We recommend setting out the rules for recording shifts and allowances in internal documents: verbal agreements in this area always become a source of disputes.

What to prepare before we start

We will need the menu with recipes, purchase data, POS reports and staff information. These data show exactly where the margin is being lost.

If there are no written recipes, we start by describing them: without a normative base, cost calculation becomes guesswork.

• menu and recipe cards
• suppliers' purchase documents
• POS reports
• data on delivery channels
• staff schedule and headcount

Differences for an individual entrepreneur and a company

A small venue run by an individual entrepreneur (IE) manages with a simpler set-up: purchases, revenue, staff. A chain or company adds transfers between branches and a central warehouse.

The control logic is the same, but for a company the cost of errors in allocating expenses between outlets is higher — that is where understanding of real profitability is most often lost.

How Leader Audit helps

We keep the books for food service businesses, help set up accounting and review the state of the accounts before reporting.

13 years of practice and more than 220 audits completed.