Expenses Pro

💰 Why Track Expenses in Unavakam

Revenue tells you how much money came in; expenses tell you how much is going out. Most restaurant owners have a good sense of their revenue — they can see it on the reports or count the cash in the register. But expenses are often tracked loosely: some are in the owner's personal bank statement, some are in cash receipts in a drawer, some are on a staff member's notebook. At month end, computing the actual profit requires hunting down all of these records and reconciling them — an error-prone process that often takes a full day.

The Expenses module gives you a single, structured place to record every cost as it happens. The person who does the daily vegetable market run logs the ingredient purchases on the Mobile App in two minutes. The manager logs the electricity bill when it arrives. The owner logs the pest control payment when the receipt comes in. All of these flow into the same shared ledger, accessible from the Admin Panel, with original receipt photos attached. At month end, the summary is already there — total by category, CSV export for the CA, and a comparison against the previous month.

📑 The Four Tabs

The Expenses screen is split into four tabs. Each gives you a different lens on the same underlying data.

Tab 1 — Expenses (List)

The default tab. Shows every expense entry as a scrollable list, sorted by date (newest first). Each row shows the date, category icon, description, and amount. You can:

• Filter by date range — use presets (Today, This Week, This Month) or pick a custom range to focus on a specific period
• Filter by category — tap a category chip to show only Ingredients, Utilities, Salaries, Maintenance, or Miscellaneous
• Tap any entry to expand it and see the full description and the attached receipt photo
• Add a new expense — the "+" button opens the Add Expense form (covered in detail below)
• Export to CSV — downloads all currently filtered entries as a spreadsheet for your accountant

Tab 2 — Summary

A visual breakdown of your expenses for the selected date range. The Summary tab answers the question: "Where did the money go?" It shows:

• Total spend card — the grand total for the selected period at a glance
• Category breakdown — each category (Ingredients, Utilities, Salaries, Maintenance, Misc) shown as a bar or pie segment with its total amount and percentage share of total spend
• Month-over-month comparison — how each category's spend compares to the previous period. A red arrow on Ingredients means ingredient costs rose compared to last month; green means they fell
• Top 5 largest expenses — the individual entries that drove the most cost in the period, useful for spotting one-off large payments that skew the totals

Use the Summary tab when reviewing expenses with the manager or owner at the end of the week or month. It gives a fast, visual picture without needing to scroll through every entry.

Tab 3 — P&L (Profit & Loss)

The P&L tab combines your revenue (from the Orders/Reports module) and your expenses (from this module) to show your gross profit and net margin for any period. This is the most important business intelligence tab — it tells you whether the restaurant is actually making money.

• Revenue — total sales for the period (pulled from order data)
• Total Expenses — sum of all logged expenses for the period
• Gross Profit — Revenue minus Total Expenses
• Net Margin % — Gross Profit as a percentage of Revenue. A healthy restaurant typically targets 10–20% net margin
• Expense breakdown chart — expenses shown as a percentage of revenue (e.g., "Ingredients: 32% of revenue, Salaries: 28% of revenue"). Industry benchmarks are shown alongside your actual figures so you can see if any category is running unusually high
• Period comparison — this month vs last month (or this year vs last year) side by side

Tab 4 — Budget

The Budget tab lets you set a monthly spending target for each expense category and track how you're tracking against those targets in real time.

• Set a budget per category — tap the edit icon next to each category (Ingredients, Utilities, Salaries, Maintenance, Misc) and enter your target monthly spend. E.g., "Ingredients: ₹80,000 / month"
• Progress bars — each category shows a progress bar: how much you've spent so far this month vs the budget. Green = under budget, amber = within 80–100% of budget, red = over budget
• Remaining budget — shows how much is left to spend in each category before the month ends
• Projected end-of-month spend — based on your pace so far this month, estimates where you'll land by month end. If you're 10 days in and have spent 55% of your Ingredients budget, the projection will show you're on track to overspend by 65%
• Budget vs Actual table — a clean table comparing every category's budget, actual spend, and variance for the current month

Setting up budgets takes 5 minutes and gives you an early-warning system. Instead of discovering at month end that you overspent on salaries by ₹20,000, the Budget tab tells you on day 20 that you're already at 90% of the salary budget with 10 days to go.