What Your Accountant Needs From Your Café POS

Almost nobody chooses a till with their accountant in the room. You choose it on what a demo shows — how fast an order goes through at the rush, how easy the menu is to change, what it costs. Then the first quarter-end arrives, you hand a login to the person who files your returns, and they come back asking for figures the system cannot produce. Now you are rebuilding three months by hand from receipts, and the cheap till has become the expensive one. These are the questions that person would ask if they sat in the demo with you. The wider demo script covers the counter; this is the half that only surfaces at quarter-end.

Does the VAT figure tie to the sales total?

This matters most and is tested least. Your accountant needs the VAT on your sales for a period, reconciling against the sales total for that same period, on the same screen, with no arithmetic in the margin. Ask to see it with a date range you choose rather than the vendor's prepared example, and ask what happens when a sale is refunded in a later period — the answer tells you whether tax was built into the sale or bolted on afterwards. Check that the period you can select matches the period you actually file, so nobody is adding monthly figures together to make a quarter. Filing VAT for a café sets out what the return asks for, which is the list your till has to answer.

Can it issue a proper tax invoice, not just a receipt?

A café hands out hundreds of receipts a day and occasionally has to produce a tax invoice for a corporate customer reclaiming the VAT. Those are different documents, and plenty of tills only do the first one properly. Ask what the printed receipt contains, whether the system can issue an invoice carrying the customer's details, and whether both come out correctly in Arabic as well as English. Don't take the required fields from a vendor, or from a blog post — ours included. Get the current list from the FTA's own guidance or your accountant and check the till against it field by field; what a compliant receipt shows explains the structure so you know what you are looking at.

Can you reconcile a day to the bank?

Your accountant has to match what the system says you took against what actually arrived — cash in the safe, card settlements in the bank. That needs payment method reported as a figure in its own right for any date range, and each shift closing with a record of what was expected against what was counted. Without both, a shortfall stays invisible until the bank reconciliation, by which point nobody remembers which day it belonged to. Daily cash reconciliation is the habit this makes possible; a till either supports it or quietly prevents it.

Where do cost of goods and closing stock come from?

Revenue is the easy half. To produce accounts your accountant needs what those sales cost you, and the value of what is still on the shelf at period end. A till that tracks only sales leaves both to be reconstructed from supplier invoices and a stocktake — which is how a café ends up with a gross margin that is really a guess. Ask whether stock sits in the same system or a separate module, whether cost of goods for a period comes out as a figure, and whether a stocktake can be recorded against it. If inventory is an add-on, price the add-on now rather than at renewal; recipe costing is what feeds the figure once the data exists.

Can you find a refund against the sale it reversed?

A refund is not a negative sale that cancels out and disappears. Your accountant needs to see which sale it reversed, when, and who processed it — partly to get the period right, partly because refunds are where till fraud usually lives. Ask the vendor to process one in the demo, then show you where it appears against the original sale. Many systems, ours included, show it against the receipt rather than in a separate refunds report, which is workable as long as you can find it. What is not workable is a refund that leaves no trail, or one anybody can process without their name attached — POS permissions worth locking down covers that side.

Can you download your own data, today?

Ask to export during the trial. Not a report emailed by support, not a PDF of a dashboard — a file you produce from your own login that opens in a spreadsheet. This is the most revealing question on the list, because a vendor who makes it awkward is telling you about the next three years. Check the format, check it covers the figures above rather than a sales total alone, and check you can scope it to a period and a branch. The same file answers whether your POS and your accounting should be one system better than any feature list will.

What is the vendor's plan for e-invoicing?

The UAE is moving to a structured e-invoicing regime, in which invoices are exchanged in a defined electronic format through accredited service providers rather than as a PDF or a printout. The phases, thresholds and dates have been revised more than once and are still being set out by the Ministry of Finance and the FTA, so confirm which phase applies to your business, and when, with them or your accountant — not from a vendor's slide. What you can fairly ask a vendor now is whether they intend to support it, roughly when, and whether it will be included or charged for. No answer at all is a risk you are at least taking knowingly.

The seven questions, and the answers to worry about

Where MidaOne fits

MidaOne was built with that quarter-end in mind, so it is fair to hold it to the same list. VAT is applied per sale and rolls up into a return-ready figure instead of sitting in a second system. The sales report for any period shows revenue, cost of goods, gross profit and margin, expenses, waste, net profit and the cash, card and other split on one screen, with breakdowns by item, category, employee, payment method, day and hour. Shift closes record expected against counted and the difference. Refunds are made from the receipt list and stay visible against the sale they reversed — there is no separate refunds report, and we would rather say so than let you find out. The accounting screen exports the selected period as a CSV, scoped to one branch or all of them, which you download yourself. It is one flat price, AED 200 a month or AED 2,000 a year, every feature and unlimited devices included.

Frequently asked questions

The till on your counter is also the book of record for everything you sell. Ten minutes of your accountant's time before you sign is the cheapest version of this conversation; the one that happens at the first quarter-end costs a weekend and a quarter of guesswork.