Recording staff meals
as an expense.

Staff meals look like a small detail but they add up over a year. A barista eating two coffees a day, a cook eating their lunch shift, the team grabbing a quick sandwich after Saturday's rush — it's all real cost that should land in your books.

01 Why it's an expense

A staff meal is real value transferred to the staff member, but no money changed hands. To keep your P&L honest, you log the cost (the COGS of what they ate) as an expense in the Meals category. Net effect: the cost shows up in your books even though the cash didn't.

Don't log it as revenue + cash payment — there was no revenue and no cash. The Meals expense, alone, is the right entry.

02 How to log it

1. 1
   Open Expenses

   Click + Add expense.

2. 2
   Amount

   The COGS of what was consumed — not the menu price. One cappuccino at €0,42 COGS = €0,42 expense.

3. 3
   Category

   Meals.

4. 4
   Note (optional)

   Quick description — "2 cappuccinos, shift change".

5. 5
   Save

   Done.

03 Weekly batching

Logging every staff coffee individually is overhead nobody needs. Most owners batch weekly: every Sunday, log one Meals expense for the rough total of the week's staff consumption. The category-level signal in Statistics works fine with weekly granularity.

Rough estimation is fine here. If your team drinks ~10 coffees a week at €0,42 COGS, that's €4,20/week or €218/year — close enough is genuinely close enough.

04 When staff meals get big

If staff meals start eating real money (say, a kitchen where each cook gets a full meal twice per shift), it's worth a closer look. At that scale, you might want to:

• Estimate the per-shift cost and log daily rather than weekly.
• Consider whether the staff meal policy is sustainable — many shops switch to subsidised rather than free at this scale.
• Check with your accountant on whether the cost is deductible the same way (jurisdiction-dependent).