Simple Restaurant Bookkeeping for Owners (No Accountant Needed)

Updated 11 August 2026 · Bunchee team

"We're busy every day, so why is there never any money left?" It's the classic restaurant owner's complaint, and the answer is almost always the same: no bookkeeping. You don't know your real profit or where the money is leaking. This article shows you a way to keep your restaurant's books yourself in 5 minutes a day — no accounting background required.

Rule number one: keep the restaurant's money separate from your own

This is where most restaurants go wrong before they've recorded a single baht. If it all comes out of the same pocket, the numbers will never add up:

• Open a separate bank account (or PromptPay) just for the restaurant
• Pay yourself a "salary" — transfer a fixed amount out of the restaurant account every month, and cover personal spending from that
• When you take stock home for yourself (rice, eggs, cooking oil), record it as a restaurant expense too

Set clear expense categories from day one

Recommended categories for a restaurant:

The 5-minute end-of-day routine

1. Record the day's total sales — split dine-in and delivery if you can
2. Record every purchase receipt — the morning market, Makro, the corner grocery, every single one. All those small receipts add up to serious money
3. Snap a photo of each receipt — so nothing gets forgotten and there's nothing to argue about later (in Bunchee, just take the photo and AI reads the amount, picks the category and saves it — no typing)
4. Sundry expenses — motorbike-taxi deliveries, ice, small repairs

What to check at the end of the month

• Gross profit = sales − ingredient costs → tells you whether your recipes, prices and portions are working
• Food Cost % = ingredient costs ÷ sales → a made-to-order (ตามสั่ง) restaurant should sit around 30–35% (see the full method here)
• Net profit = sales − all expense categories → the real money that ends up in your pocket
• Compare with last month — if a category grew unusually, dig into the transactions in that category

The most common mistakes

• Recording cash but forgetting transfers — these days half your transactions are QR payments, so capture both
• "I'll enter it later" — three days on, you've definitely forgotten. Missing numbers make the whole month unreliable
• Not recording stock you take for yourself — costs look lower than they really are, so profit looks great on paper while the real cash disappears
• Never looking back — recording without reviewing is as good as not recording. Block out 15 minutes at the end of every month to go over the summary

Notebook vs Excel vs app

A notebook is easy to start but painful for totaling up and looking back. Excel is flexible, but you have to sit at a computer to fill it in, and editing on a phone is awkward. A restaurant accounting app like Bunchee is built so you can log an entry in 3 seconds while standing at the stove: snap a receipt for AI to read, get totals automatically, and import your old Excel data in one go. (For detailed criteria on picking an app, read: How to choose a restaurant accounting app)