How to Work Out a Simple Monthly Profit and Loss Without an Accountant

Take your net sales for the month. Subtract what the food, drink or goods you sold cost you. That is gross profit. Then subtract every running cost: rent, salaries, utilities, commissions, fees and a monthly share of yearly bills. What is left is net profit. You can do it in a notebook in about an hour once a month.

This is an owner's management view, not a formal financial statement. It tells you whether the business made money this month and where the money went. That is enough to make most decisions.

Start with what customers actually paid you. Use the month's total from your till, after discounts. Take off refunds and voided orders. If you add VAT or service charge in future, leave them out too; they are not your money.

1. 1Pull the month's sales total from your till report
2. 2Check that discounts, refunds and voids are already taken off. If not, subtract them
3. 3Split the total by channel: counter and dine-in, takeaway, and each delivery app
4. 4Write down each delivery app's sales at the menu price the customer paid
5. 5Note the commission rate each app charges. You will use it in step 3

Splitting by channel matters because the channels earn very different amounts. A café can sell more through delivery every month and still make less, if commission and packaging eat the margin.

Cost of goods is what the things you sold cost you: ingredients, packaging and stock for resale. It is not what you bought this month. There are two ways to work it out, and they answer slightly different questions.

The best answer uses both. If method A says 23,400 and method B says 25,000, the 1,600 QAR gap is stock that left without being sold: waste, staff meals, heavy portions or theft. Our inventory management guide covers how to run the stock count and chase that gap.

In Outale, each sale records its cost when it is rung up: the recipe cost if the product has a recipe, otherwise the product's cost price. A product with neither counts as zero cost, so fill those in first. Recorded wastage is added to cost too. Stock periods give you method B's inputs: they snapshot opening stock at cost, track what was received and wasted, take a closing count, then lock the month and print a PDF.

Gross profit is net sales minus cost of goods. Divide it by net sales to get gross margin. A café with 78,000 QAR sales and 23,400 cost of goods has 54,600 gross profit, a 70% gross margin. To fix the cost of a single dish, see our menu costing guide.

Now list every cost of keeping the doors open for the month. Use the month the cost belongs to, not the month you paid it.

• Rent, including service charge from the landlord
• Salaries and wages, plus staff housing, food and transport allowances
• Visa, ID renewal and medical costs for staff, spread monthly
• Electricity, water, gas, internet and phones
• Delivery app commissions, if your sales figure is not already net of them
• Card machine fees, usually a percentage of card sales
• Marketing: ads, influencers, printing, giveaways
• Maintenance, cleaning, pest control and small equipment
• Trade licence, municipality, civil defence and other permits, spread monthly
• Software subscriptions, including your POS
• A salary for you, if you work in the business

Net profit is gross profit minus all running costs. Divide by net sales for net margin. That is the number that tells you whether the business is working.

Here is one month for a small Doha café with five staff, one branch and two delivery apps. The figures are illustrative, not from a real business.

Look at what the example shows. Without the owner's salary the café seems to make 9,400 QAR. With it, 3,400. Delivery is 23% of sales, but its commission alone is bigger than the whole month's profit.

If your margins are well below these and you are always busy, our post on why a café can be busy but not making a profit walks through the usual causes.

• Treating cash in the bank as profit. The balance includes money you owe suppliers, rent you have not paid yet and the next visa renewal. Profit is what is left after the month's costs, whether paid or not
• Forgetting yearly costs. Licence renewals, visa renewals and insurance hit once a year. Leave them out and every month looks better than it is
• Leaving out your own salary. If you work the counter six days a week, that work has a price. A business that only breaks even when you work for free is not profitable yet
• Counting stock bought instead of stock used. A big supplier order at the end of the month makes that month look bad and the next one look great. Use cost of goods, not purchases
• Mixing personal and business money. Family groceries on the business card, or business bills from your personal account, make every number wrong. Keep one separate account and card for the business

A one-page P&L is for running the business. You still need a qualified accountant for anything formal. In Qatar that usually means:

• Audited accounts, which many company types must file each year
• Tax returns. Companies with foreign ownership may owe corporate income tax on their share of profit
• Bank loans and financing, where the bank asks for formal financial statements
• Partners, investors or selling the business, where everyone needs to trust the same numbers
• Any new tax, such as VAT if Qatar introduces it, which would need proper books from the start

Your POS should hand that accountant clean numbers. In Outale, the Monthly Profit & Loss Summary report shows sales, cost of goods, gross profit, the expenses you record and net profit, month by month for up to twelve months, and exports to PDF. It uses the same figures as the sales pages, so the two always agree. Expenses take a category and a payment method, and rent or salaries can be set to repeat monthly.

• Delivery orders count at full value. Commission is not deducted, so record it as an expense
• A yearly repeating expense lands whole in its month. To spread a licence, enter it as a monthly amount
• The P&L shows one branch at a time on a multi-branch account
• Outale is not accounting software. There is no ledger, journals, bank reconciliation or tax filing. Your accountant works from its reports