How Much Do You Really Spend on Your Restaurant Every Month? (Including Cash)

You've closed another busy month. The dining room was full, the kitchen never stopped, the card machine barely rested. But when you look at your bank balance, the number doesn't match the feeling. You worked so hard, and in the end so little was left. Where did the money go?

This is the most important question a restaurant owner asks. And most can't answer it with a number. It's not for lack of work. It's for lack of knowing how much you spend per month. The real total, everything added up.

Billing a lot isn't the same as earning a lot

High revenue is deceptive. You can have the restaurant packed every weekend and still close the month in the red. What comes in the door isn't yours. What's yours is what's left after paying for everything that went out.

The right question was never "how much did I bill." It's "how much is left." And to know how much is left, you have to know how much went out. Not part of it. All of it.

Most restaurants that close don't close for lack of customers. They close because the owner never really knew how much they were spending, where they were spending it, and only realized there was a problem once the money stopped stretching far enough. The bank account is the symptom. The missing number is the cause.

Your accountant only sees half the picture

Your accountant sees the invoices you hand over. They see what goes through the bank. And they do their job well. But there's an entire part of your restaurant that never reaches their desk: cash.

You pay for fresh fish in cash at the market. You hand a few euros to the herb seller who shows up at the door. The fridge breaks down on a Sunday and the technician only takes cash. There are dozens of small payments every month, many without an invoice, some with a receipt that gets lost in an apron pocket.

This isn't about hiding anything. It's the day-to-day reality of running a restaurant. But if that money isn't recorded anywhere, your financial picture has a hole in it. And the hole is always on the expense side, which makes the month look better than it actually was.

There's also the timing problem. Your accountant closes the books weeks after the month ends. By the time you get the number, you're already halfway through the next month making the same mistakes. You need to know today, not three weeks from now.

The mistake almost everyone makes: mixing the two wallets

You take €50 from the till to buy lunch. You fill up the car with the restaurant's card. You pay for your kid's school and, while you're at it, the drinks supplier, from the same account. By the end of the month, nobody can tell what belonged to the restaurant and what belonged to you.

As long as your personal money and the business's money live in the same wallet, you'll never have a number you can trust. The rule is simple: everything spent on the restaurant gets logged as a restaurant expense. No exceptions, even when it came out of your own pocket in cash.

How to know how much you spend on your restaurant every month

You don't need to be an accountant. You need a method. These five steps are enough:

1. Bring everything into one place. Supplier invoices, receipts, slips, and also the cash that went out with no paperwork at all. If it stays scattered across drawers and pockets, the number will never show up.
2. Log it in the moment. An unlogged expense is a forgotten expense. Photograph the invoice on delivery, note the cash payment the same day.
3. Split it into categories. Food, staff, premises, utilities. Knowing you spent €4,000 doesn't help. Knowing that €1,200 went on meat and fish already tells you where to look.
4. Always include cash. It's the difference between an approximate number and the real one. It's exactly the part the rest of the world doesn't see, and the one that misleads you the most.
5. Compare month to month. A single month is a snapshot. Three months side by side are a film, and it's in the film that you see prices rising and leaks growing.

Once you've done this, you finally have the number that was missing. And with it, for the first time, you can cross-reference what you spent against what you sold and see the month's Result: whether there was money left over or a shortfall.

How Tinz gives you the real number

Tinz exists exactly for this number. You photograph the supplier's invoice and OCR reads everything, the supplier, the items, the total, and files it into the Expenses section by category. Cash payments with no invoice? You log them in seconds as Cash, visible only to you, and they count just like everything else. The Dashboard adds it all up in real time and shows you, today, how much you've already spent this month and on what, without waiting for the books to close. It's your expense ledger, no spreadsheets and no gaps. You can try it free for 14 days, no credit card required, at app.mytinz.com.

You already do the work every day. All that's missing is for the money going out to be recorded as well as the money coming in. From there, you stop managing by gut feeling and start managing by numbers.