There is a carrier bag behind the office door of most independent cafés. Till rolls, delivery notes, a folded invoice from the coffee roaster, a receipt for a mop, and something sticky at the bottom that used to be a card slip.

That bag is not a bookkeeping system. It is an invoice you have not received yet. Your accountant tips it out in January, puts it in order, bills you for the hours, and hands back a picture of a year that finished months ago.

Bookkeeping for a café or a small restaurant does not have to work like that. The version that works is small, repeated and boring: five minutes a day, thirty minutes a week, an hour a month. Here is the whole routine, with the clock against each step.

What café bookkeeping is actually for

Bookkeeping for a café or restaurant in the UK has two jobs, and most operators only ever do the first, badly and late.

The first is satisfying HMRC: records that prove what came in and what went out, kept for as long as the rules say. Backward-looking, with a deadline.

The second is telling you what is happening while you can still do something about it. Whether last week's gross profit held. Whether the dairy account has crept up again. Whether the wage bill matched the rota or quietly beat it by nine hours.

That is the job that makes you money, and the carrier bag makes it impossible, because you cannot see a trend in a bag.

Done weekly you get both for the price of one, because the records that keep HMRC happy are the same records that answer your questions.

Daily: five minutes at cashing up

Three numbers, every trading day, written down before you lock up.

The Z read. What the till says you took, split by VAT rate if your EPOS allows it.
The card taken. What the till says went through on card, checked against the terminal total once tips are stripped out.
The cash counted. Drawer, minus the float, into the safe or the bank bag.

Z read against card plus cash is the whole check. If they do not agree, write the difference down rather than making it good out of your own pocket: catching till variance before it becomes a habit is a daily job, not a monthly investigation.

Two café-specific things to keep separate.

Tips are not takings. Card tips and a discretionary service charge are held for your staff, not turnover, and must be distributed under a written policy: read what the Allocation of Tips Act means for tronc and service charge before you touch the bookkeeping side, because tips landing in your sales figure inflates your turnover and your tax bill.

A mandatory service charge is different for tax. It is part of the bill, so it is your turnover and it is standard-rated for VAT, and anything you pass to staff from it is wages through payroll, not a tip.

The note of anything odd. A refund, a walk-out, a staff meal, a delivery that arrived short. One line in the cashing-up book, and you save twenty minutes of "what was this?" later.

The weekly 30 minutes: bookkeeping for a small café, step by step

Same slot every week. Mine is early on a quiet weekday, before the bakery deliveries, with a pot of tea. Pick yours and defend it.

1. Bank reconciliation. 10 minutes.

Open last week's bank transactions and match each one to something you already know about. Card settlements to the daily Z reads, supplier payments to invoices, direct debits to the bills you expect.

Anything you cannot match gets a flag, not a guess. Unmatched transactions are how you find a subscription you cancelled in March, a supplier taking two payments, or a refund that never landed.

2. Invoices in and coded. 10 minutes.

Every delivery note and invoice from the week goes in, checked against what actually arrived and given an account code. Not one code called Purchases: coffee, food, packaging, cleaning and repairs are different lines, and coding supplier invoices to the right account codes is the difference between a gross profit figure you can trust and a number that means nothing.

Skip a week and this step does not double, it quadruples: you have stopped remembering the deliveries.

3. Hours against the rota. 5 minutes.

Lay the clock-in totals next to the rota you published. Not to catch anyone out, but because the gap between planned and actual hours is where your wage percentage goes wrong, one late finish at a time (the gap between the hours you rota and the hours you pay). Write the week's hours and rough cost down while you can still change next week's rota.

4. Waste and staff meals. 3 minutes.

Two short lists: what you threw away, and what the team ate.

Staff meals go through the till at £0.00 so the item leaves your stock properly, then get valued at cost when you look at food usage. Waste is the same idea. Neither is a sale, but both are food that left the building, and if you never write them down your gross profit looks worse than your buying is.

5. One look at the week's gross profit. 2 minutes.

Takings ex-VAT minus food and drink purchases ex-VAT, divided by takings, as a rough percentage. It is not accounting-grade, because deliveries and consumption never line up neatly inside seven days. You are looking for movement. Four weeks around 68% and then a week at 61% is a question worth asking on the Tuesday, not the following March.

Monthly: the hour that catches drift

Four jobs, once the month has closed.

Supplier statements. Check your top three accounts against your own invoice file before you pay. Reconciling supplier statements is where missing credit notes, duplicate invoices and phantom deliveries come to light, and it takes about fifteen minutes.

A stock count. Count the shelves and the fridges at the same point every month. Opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock is your real cost of sales, and without it your monthly gross profit is a purchases figure in disguise.

A glance at the P&L. Sales, gross profit, wages, rent, the total at the bottom, and how each compares to last month. Anything that moved more than a few percent gets a question asked of it.

A card fee check. If your provider settles net, what you rang through the till lands in the bank as less. That gap is a cost, not a discount on your sales: turnover is the gross figure and the fee is an expense line of its own. Book it any other way and you understate both, every month.

Quarterly: VAT and, for some of you, MTD

The VAT return. For a café the hard part is never the arithmetic, it is the splits. Hot food and eat-in at 20%, most cold takeaway at zero, and a menu where the same scone is one rate on a plate and another in a paper bag. If your EPOS splits takings by rate you are most of the way there. If not, the complete guide to VAT on food and drink for UK cafés is where to start, because a guessed split is an assessment waiting to happen.

One change that has already landed: the temporary 5% VAT rate on children's meals ended on 1 September 2026, so sales from 2 September are back at 20%. If your till still has the reduced rate on a button, a quarter straddling the change will be wrong in two directions.

MTD quarterly updates. If you trade as a sole trader with qualifying income over £50,000, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has applied to you since 6 April 2026, and the first quarterly update deadline was 7 August 2026. The threshold falls to £30,000 from 6 April 2027 and £20,000 from 6 April 2028, so plenty of operators out of scope today will be in it within two years. Qualifying income is turnover, not profit: a café taking £120,000 a year is over the first threshold whatever it takes home.

Year end: what your accountant actually needs

If the weekly routine has been running, this is a folder rather than an ordeal. The list is the same every year.

Bank statements for the full period, every account, business card included
Sales records: daily takings split by VAT rate, with the till reports behind them
All purchase invoices and receipts, coded
A closing stock figure at the year end date, with the count sheet
Wage records: gross pay, tax, National Insurance, pension contributions, payroll reports
What you owe and are owed, plus cash and float on hand, at the year end date
Loan, lease and hire purchase agreements, with statements
Anything unusual: equipment bought or sold, an insurance claim, a grant

Self Assessment is due online by 31 January after the end of the tax year. A clean folder in the autumn rather than a bag in January is the cheapest negotiating position you will ever have on an accountant's fee.

What records you need to keep for your café for HMRC, and for how long

If you are self-employed, HMRC wants records of all sales and income, all business expenses, VAT records if you are registered, PAYE records if you employ people, your personal income, and any grants you claimed.

How long you keep them:

Who you are	How long you keep records
Sole trader or partner	At least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the relevant tax year
Limited company	6 years from the end of the last company financial year they relate to
VAT registered	At least 6 years

Company records sometimes run longer: where a transaction covers more than one accounting period, where an asset should last more than six years, where you filed your Company Tax Return late, or where HMRC has opened a compliance check.

If you are VAT registered, HMRC expects a record of everything you buy and sell including zero-rated, reduced and exempt items, copies of every invoice you issue and receive, debit and credit notes, and any goods you give away or take from stock for private use. Keep the general records too: bank statements, cash books, paying-in slips and till rolls.

Spreadsheet, software or a bookkeeper?

Here is the honest version, by size.

Solo, one site, under both the VAT threshold and the MTD income threshold. A café bookkeeping spreadsheet is genuinely fine, as long as it is the same one every week.

Two tabs. Sales: date, gross takings, VAT split, card, cash. Purchases: date, supplier, invoice number, gross, VAT, net, account code, paid from. That is it. The elaborate templates people download get abandoned in six weeks: twenty columns nobody fills in.

VAT registered, or in scope for MTD. You need compatible software and digital records, so a spreadsheet stops being enough on its own. Xero, QuickBooks and Sage all do the job, and the one your accountant already uses is usually the right answer.

Two or more sites, or a limited company with staff. Buy a few hours of a bookkeeper's time a month for the reconciliation and a coding review. The weekly half hour stays yours: it is where you learn things about your own business.

Whichever you pick, the tool is not the routine. Software only knows what someone puts into it.

Where Brikly fits, and where it does not

The step that fails most often is step two. Getting invoices in and coded is fiddly, dull, and the one job that punishes you for skipping a week.

CostingBrik reads your supplier invoices, keeps the line detail and price history behind every ingredient, and can send a draft bill to Xero, Sage or QuickBooks with the original document attached and coded, ready for you to approve.

It does not do your bank reconciliation, count what is on your shelves, or file your VAT return. Those are still your jobs, and the ten minutes it saves only helps if you spend them on the rest of the list.

The version of café bookkeeping that fails is the one that waits. Nobody does nine months of paperwork in one heroic November weekend, and everybody who says they will ends up handing over the carrier bag.

The version that works is small enough to be dull. Five minutes at cashing up. Thirty minutes on the same morning every week. An hour when the month closes. Do that for a quarter and two things change: your accountant's bill goes down, and you know what last week was worth before this week is over.

Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafés in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent café owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.

Café bookkeeping: the weekly 30-minute routine that works