Restaurant & F&B Accounting in Dubai

• 21 September, 2026
• By Safwan, Managing Partner
• Accounting

Last reviewed 21 September 2026 by the Exiloz tax team against the UAE legislation in force on that date. Tax law moves — confirm any figure against tax.gov.ae before you act on it.

Same sales, different bank balance

Two restaurants on the same JBR block can ring up the same AED 200,000 a month and still land in completely different places at the bank. The gap is rarely the food. It’s the accounting underneath it: how food cost and prime cost are tracked, whether delivery-app sales are booked gross or net, and how the 5% VAT baked into every menu price is pulled back out. UAE restaurant food and beverage is standard-rated at 5%, and a Talabat or Deliveroo commission of roughly 25–35% can quietly swallow a month’s margin if it’s recorded wrong. Get these controls right and the P&L finally tells the truth. If you would rather not handle this in house, this is what our outsourced accounting covers.

Here’s how I think about restaurant books, and why the usual bookkeeping template fails F&B. A trading company sells what it buys. A restaurant buys ingredients, turns them into something else, and sells that across a counter, a table, and three delivery apps at once, each with its own commission and payout cycle. The numbers that actually run the business are not in the annual accounts. They’re in a weekly sheet the operator checks before the weekend.

Food cost and prime cost: the two numbers that run the month

Food cost percentage is the first. Take the cost of the food and beverage you actually sold in a period and divide it by sales. For many concepts it sits somewhere around 28–35%, but treat that as a typical band, not a rule. A shawarma counter and a fine-dining kitchen live in different places. The number that matters more day to day is prime cost: food and beverage cost plus labour. That’s the figure a good operator manages every week, because it’s the part of the P&L you can move fast. Rent won’t change on a Tuesday. Your rota and your wastage will.

Delivery apps: book the gross, expense the commission

This is the entry I fix most. When an order comes through Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem or Noon Food, the platform keeps a commission, commonly in the 25–35% range, and pays you the rest. The tempting shortcut is to bank the payout and call that revenue. Don’t. Record the full gross sale as revenue and the commission as a separate expense. Net them together and you understate both your true sales and your cost of doing business on those channels, which quietly hides how expensive delivery really is. Then reconcile: the platform payout lands net of commission, and sometimes net of VAT, so it should tie back to the gross orders in your POS every settlement.

The 5% VAT hiding inside every menu price

UAE restaurant food and beverage is standard-rated at 5% under Federal Tax Authority VAT rules. Menu prices are almost always shown VAT-inclusive, which is fine, but it means the tax is sitting inside the number on the menu, not added on top. To pull it out, use the 5/105 fraction: divide the inclusive price by 21 and you get the VAT portion. An AED 105 dish carries AED 5 of VAT and AED 100 of net revenue. Delivery adds a wrinkle worth flagging to your accountant: the VAT treatment of the aggregator’s commission, and who issues the tax invoice to the customer, needs checking per platform. Don’t assume it’s the same across all four.

Tips belong to staff. A service charge belongs to the business.

These two get lumped together and they shouldn’t be. A tip a guest leaves for the team is the staff’s money passing through your till; it isn’t your revenue. A service charge you add to the bill is business income, and it’s part of the standard-rated sale. Keep them in separate lines. It changes how each one hits payroll and VAT, and it’s the kind of thing that looks trivial until an FTA reviewer asks why your service-charge income never appears in your output tax.

The monthly KPI table every operator should run

Run this every month, with a lighter weekly version for prime cost. The bands are typical, not targets handed down by anyone official; your concept sets your own line. What matters is that the number moves in the right direction, and that you can explain any month it doesn’t.

Worked example: a JBR restaurant on AED 200,000 a month

Picture the month end for a mid-size JBR restaurant. Total gross sales of AED 200,000, split AED 130,000 dine-in and AED 70,000 through the delivery apps. First, strip out VAT: AED 200,000 ÷ 21 gives about AED 9,524 of output VAT, leaving roughly AED 190,476 of net revenue. Food and beverage cost of sales came in at AED 57,000, so food cost is 30%. Healthy enough. Add AED 60,000 of kitchen and floor labour and prime cost is AED 117,000, or 61% of net sales. Now the part owners miss: the delivery channel. At a 28% commission, that AED 70,000 of app sales costs AED 19,600 in platform fees, and the money hitting the bank from the aggregators is closer to AED 50,400 before VAT adjustments. Book the full AED 70,000 as revenue and the AED 19,600 as a delivery-commission expense. Net it, and the P&L would show AED 50,400 of ‘sales’ and hide the single most expensive line on the menu.

Common mistakes we see in F&B books

Official sources

None of this needs a bigger accounting team. It needs the right chart of accounts, a POS that reconciles daily, and someone watching prime cost weekly instead of discovering it in the annual accounts. If your delivery commissions and food cost aren’t visible line by line, that’s the first thing to fix. Our cost control and analysis team builds the food-cost and prime-cost tracking, and our monthly management reports put the KPI table in front of you before the month gets away. For the full setup, start with our Dubai accounting services.

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