Restaurant and café management software

The restaurant and café management software in Fahim is a system that links the order to the recipe to the stock to the invoice, turning the cost and margin of every dish into a number you can see rather than an estimate. This page is for owners of restaurants, cafés, bakeries and central kitchens in Saudi Arabia, and for branch managers who want to know where waste goes, issue a simplified invoice meeting the requirements of the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) with every order, and keep an eye on the restaurant from WhatsApp.

A restaurant owner knows today's sales precisely, and rarely knows the margin on a plate. The gap between the two is food cost and waste — and those are exactly what an ordinary till system does not show.

The real problem in restaurants

You sell a hundred covers and close the month at a loss. The cause is usually one of three: ingredient costs rose and the menu price did not, waste in the kitchen that nobody measures, or stock consumption that does not match what was actually sold. None of them surfaces unless the order is linked to the recipe.

What Fahim does

• Links orders to recipes. Define each item's ingredients, and selling the dish deducts them from stock automatically while showing its true cost and margin.
• Measures waste. The gap between theoretical consumption (from sales) and actual consumption (from stock-count) is your waste figure — measured rather than guessed.
• Purchasing from a photo. Send a picture of the supplier invoice; it is booked, quantities and costs updated, so plate margin moves with market prices.
• Shift permissions. Cashiers sell, managers discount and void, and every void is logged against whoever authorised it.
• Phone oversight. “What are today's sales?”, “Best-selling item this week?” — asked in WhatsApp, answered with a current number.

Example: how plate cost is calculated

Take, for example, a burger on a café menu. The recipe recorded in the system: bun SAR 1.5, meat SAR 9, cheese SAR 1, vegetables and sauce SAR 1.5, packaging SAR 1. Ingredient cost is SAR 14. The selling price before tax is SAR 32, so the gross margin is SAR 18, or 56% of the price, before rent and salaries.

Now the supplier's meat price rises from SAR 9 to SAR 11. The same day you photograph the supplier's invoice, the burger's cost becomes SAR 16 and its margin drops to 50%. Nobody recalculates by hand, and the figure is in front of you before you decide whether to raise the price or change supplier. That is the difference between knowing sales and knowing profit.

How waste is actually measured

Waste is not a feeling that “the kitchen uses too much”. It is an equation of 3 numbers: theoretical consumption from recipes, actual consumption from the stock-count, and the difference between them. For example: you sold 400 burgers this week, so theoretical meat consumption is 40 kilograms. The count says 43 kilograms left the fridge. The 3-kilogram difference is waste or unrecorded consumption, with a value you know in riyals. A restaurant that measures this figure weekly knows where to look: portion size, spoilage, or unrecorded free meals.

Branches and the central kitchen

If you have a central kitchen preparing and distributing to branches, a transfer between them is one message: “transfer 30 kilograms of marinated chicken from the central kitchen to Al Malqa branch”, deducted from the kitchen's stock and added to the branch's stock in the same movement. You see each branch's consumption, waste and margin separately, while the overall picture stays in one report that compares the branches with each other, so you know which branch wastes more and which sells at a lower margin.

A day in a restaurant running on the system

An example of an ordinary day in a two-branch restaurant on the Moeen plan:

1. Morning: the owner receives a summary from Moeen: yesterday's sales in both branches, the 3 best-selling items, two ingredients below their reorder level, and a supplier invoice due in two days.
2. Receiving goods: the kitchen lead photographs the vegetable supplier's invoice and sends it; the purchase is recorded and the cost of every recipe it feeds into is updated.
3. The shift: the cashier records orders, and each order issues a simplified invoice with its QR code and deducts its ingredients from stock at the same moment.
4. A discount request: a regular customer asks for a discount. The cashier has no permission, so the branch manager approves it from his phone, and it is logged under his name.
5. Afternoon: the owner asks in WhatsApp: “what is the margin on grills this week?”, and gets the figure in riyals and as a percentage.
6. Closing: the shift closes with a cash, card and delivery report, and voids appear with the names of those who approved them.

What Moeen adds

Moeen is the personal assistant included from the Moeen plan upwards. It does not record an order or void an invoice, but it follows up for you: a morning summary of the branches and margin, an alert when an ingredient nears depletion or its supplier price rises, reminders for supplier invoices due, and a weekly waste report or a draft new price list prepared when you ask. It asks your permission before any action that changes data, such as creating a purchase order.

Permissions: 5 ready-made roles

The system comes with five roles: general manager, sales manager, accountant, warehouse supervisor and employee. A cashier is an employee who only records orders. The branch manager, in the sales manager role, approves discounts and voids. The kitchen lead, in the warehouse supervisor role, receives goods and runs stock-counts. The accountant sees costs and tax without touching prices.

Compliance

Every sale issues a simplified invoice meeting e-invoicing requirements, with the QR code and mandatory fields, flowing straight into tax reporting with no second entry.

To be clear: the Authority made Phase One (generation) mandatory from 4 December 2021, and Phase Two (integration with the Fatoora platform) began on 1 January 2023 in waves by revenue. The simplified invoice is the one handed to the guest in the dining room; if the restaurant serves companies under catering contracts, a standard tax invoice is issued to them from the same system. VAT at 15% is calculated and shown on every invoice.

An ordinary restaurant till or an integrated system?

• An ordinary restaurant till: it knows sales and the most-ordered items, but not plate cost or waste, because the recipe is not in it.
• A till with a spreadsheet for costs: the cost is updated when someone finds time to update it, and usually nobody does.
• An integrated system: order, recipe, stock, purchasing and invoice in one database, with margin moving with every supplier invoice.

How to start, in 3 steps

1. Enter the menu and recipes: each item with its ingredients and quantities, plus current purchase prices.
2. Record the opening stock-count for the store and the fridge, and assign permissions to the team.
3. Start operating from a browser on any device, and connect a printer and payment terminal as needed.

The first month is a fully free trial. Prices after that are per user per month: Essential SAR 75 on the web, Moeen SAR 375 with WhatsApp and the personal assistant, Fahim SAR 935 with AI that modifies the system at your request within minutes, and Enterprise on request. Prices exclude 15% VAT, and the “Golden Guarantee” refunds the full amount within 30 days. Details are on the pricing page.

Read next

• Running a restaurant from WhatsApp
• Production and waste in bakeries
• The POS and cashier system