Customer story
Supplier invoice tracking
Log every supplier payment and always know your food cost ratio.
ereQa for Restaurants & Hospitality
Run a tighter operation. Understand your margins.
Food costs, supplier invoices, staff costs — ereQa gives restaurant owners a clear view of every naira coming in and going out.
With food inflation squeezing every Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt kitchen, Nigerian restaurateurs need to know their true food-cost ratio. ereQa logs supplier bills in naira, handles catering quotes and deposits, and shows you exactly where margin is leaking — before it costs you the month.
Sound familiar?
Common challenges we solve for Restaurants & Hospitality.
- Food cost percentages eating into profit
- Supplier invoices piling up untracked
- No visibility into daily vs monthly revenue
- Catering event invoicing is manual and slow
Built for your workflow
Everything you need
Catering & event invoicing
Create professional quotes and invoices for catering events in minutes.
Expense categories
Separate food costs, labour, rent and utilities for accurate P&L.
AI monthly review
AI identifies which expense categories are growing fastest month-on-month.
Payment reminders
Automatically follow up on outstanding catering deposits and balances.
Reports for investors
Generate clean financial reports for bank loans or investor decks.
"I had no idea my food cost was 47% until ereQa showed me. I renegotiated supplier contracts and dropped it to 32%."
Chiamaka R.
Restaurant Owner · Port Harcourt
Kitchens run on thin margins and fast-moving cash, which is a combination that hides problems well. Food cost drifts by a percentage point a week and nobody notices until the quarter is already gone.
Food cost is a weekly number, not an annual one
A kitchen holding 30% food cost is healthy; one at 38% is usually losing money once rent and staff are counted, and the journey between the two takes about six weeks of unwatched supplier price rises and over-portioning. By the time it shows in an annual account the cause is long forgotten.
Tracking purchases against sales weekly turns that into a number someone can act on while the cause is still in living memory.
The costs that sit below the gross line
Hospitality carries an unusually heavy fixed base, and it all sits underneath a gross margin that looks reassuring:
- Rent, which does not care how many covers you did.
- Staff, largely fixed within a rota, and carrying PAYE and pension obligations remitted monthly.
- Power — grid supply plus diesel, which for many Nigerian kitchens is the second-largest line after food.
- Gas, cleaning, breakages and licences, individually small and collectively material.
A 65% gross margin on food is not a profitable restaurant. It is a restaurant that might be profitable once those are paid.
Events, deposits and corporate accounts
The invoiced side of hospitality behaves nothing like the walk-in side. Event bookings involve a deposit taken weeks ahead, a balance due after, and a corporate client who pays on their terms rather than yours. Deposits in particular are not revenue when received — the obligation to deliver still exists — and treating them as revenue is how a good month becomes a bad quarter.
Corporate accounts also mean withholding tax deducted from your invoices, and credit notes you need to keep to claim it back.
Questions
Frequently asked
How do I track food cost percentage?
Record supplier purchases against the same period as sales and divide purchases by revenue for that period. Weekly is frequent enough to catch drift and infrequent enough to be sustainable; monthly is usually too late to identify the cause.
Is restaurant food subject to VAT in Nigeria?
Prepared meals and hospitality services are standard-rated at 7.5%; unprocessed basic food items are zero-rated. A restaurant that also sells raw produce is applying both treatments, and the distinction is a question for your adviser.
How should I handle event deposits?
A deposit is money received against work not yet delivered. Record it as a payment against the booking rather than as earned revenue, so cancelling the event does not require unwinding a month you have already reported.
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Related tools and reading
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