Restaurants
The back office behind the dining room.
Supplier bills arriving daily, staff buying things in cash, and VAT that has to be right at the end of it.
Start freeEmber Kitchen
This week's kitchen spend · Payables and claims
| Vendor or claim | Amount |
|---|---|
| Mile 12 produce4 bills · read from email | ₦486,000 |
| Gas supplydue in 3 days | ₦210,000 |
| Cold room repairawaiting approval | ₦85,000 |
| Staff claims6 receipts categorised | ₦47,500 |
The problem
Where the cash gets stuck here.
A kitchen buys from a dozen suppliers, several of them daily, most of them informally. Bills arrive as WhatsApp photographs, delivery notes and verbal totals, and somebody is expected to turn that into accounts.
Then there is the cash. A supervisor buys gas, a driver is sent for produce, a repair is paid for on the spot. Each is small, all of it is real, and none of it reaches the books in a form anyone can reconcile later.
01
Bills that are photographs
The supplier invoice is an image in a chat thread. Retyping it is the only way it becomes a record, so mostly it does not become one.
02
Cash purchases with no trail
Cash handed over for an urgent purchase is gone the moment it leaves the drawer, and the receipt is in someone's pocket.
03
Food cost known only in hindsight
What the kitchen spent this week is a question answered next month, which is too late to do anything about it.
04
VAT assembled from scratch
Filing means rebuilding the period from bank statements, because nothing was captured in a filing-ready form as it happened.
On Billif
How the same work runs instead.
Forward the bill, and it files itself
Suppliers send to your Billif mailbox, or staff forward the photograph. OCR reads the vendor, amount and due date and creates the payable.
Staff spend becomes a claim
Whoever spent it photographs the receipt. AI categorises it, and it routes for approval rather than disappearing.
Approval rules that suit a kitchen
Set what a supervisor can authorise alone and what needs the owner. Urgent purchases still happen; they just leave a record.
VAT that was never lost
Because every bill and receipt entered as structured data, the VAT report is a read rather than a reconstruction.
What you'll use
The parts of Billif this leans on.
Payables
Vendor bills tracked, approved and paid
- Forward a bill to your Billif mailbox and it is read automatically
- OCR and AI extraction turn the document into a payable
- Vendor bills tracked to a due date
Spend and reimbursement
Staff expenses and claims, with receipts and sign-off
- Expense capture with receipts
- AI reads and categorises the receipt for you
- Employee reimbursement claims
VAT and reporting
VAT records and the numbers behind them
- VAT report
- Revenue versus expenses over time
- Invoice and payable status, including what is overdue
Collections and settlement
A funding account, collections in, payouts out, settled to your bank
- A funding account for collections and payouts
- Payments collected against invoices
- Payouts and transfers to bank accounts
Guides for restaurants
Your story could go here
We are collecting stories from restaurants businesses running on Billif. If that is you, we would like to hear how it changed the work.
Tell us about it