Why cafés are financially tricky
Cafés have multiple simultaneous cost streams: raw ingredients (coffee beans, milk, syrups, food), packaging (cups, lids, straws, bags), utilities (electricity for espresso machines and refrigerators, water), staff wages, and rent. Revenue comes from multiple payment methods — cash, GCash, Maya, and sometimes credit card. Reconciling everything at month end is a full-day exercise in guesswork.
The other issue is spoilage and waste. Ingredients that expire or drinks that get remade represent lost revenue that never appears in your income line but absolutely affects your profit. A café that wastes 10% of its ingredients every week is running 10 points thinner than its revenue suggests.
The 30-second daily habit
At the end of every operating day, one person (owner or manager) photographs the POS closing screen or the register tally. That image goes into Pipable, and the AI extracts the day's gross revenue, payment method breakdown (cash vs GCash vs card), and transaction count. It takes less time than locking the front door.
This one habit means you always know: what you earned today, whether today was better or worse than the same day last week, and whether payment method trends are shifting (more GCash, less cash).
Tracking cost of goods sold (COGS) for a café
For a café, COGS is primarily ingredients. A simple method: log your supplier invoices when they arrive. If you buy coffee beans, milk, and syrup every Tuesday, photograph or upload the receipt when it comes in. Pipable categorises it as a COGS expense, and you can see your ingredient cost as a percentage of your revenue for the same period.
A healthy café targets 28–35% COGS relative to revenue. If your ingredient costs are above 40%, you either need to raise prices, reduce waste, or find cheaper suppliers — and you can only know this if you're actually logging the purchases.
What your daily numbers should tell you
On a good day, you earned more than your daily break-even (rent + wages + average daily ingredient cost). On a quiet day, you earned less. The goal of daily bookkeeping is not to celebrate or panic over individual days — it's to see the pattern.
If every Monday is your lowest revenue day, you might reduce staff hours on Mondays. If a particular week shows a revenue spike, you check whether it corresponds to a nearby event or a social media post that drove traffic — and then you do more of that.
Dealing with multiple payment methods
The reconciliation headache for cafés is matching your POS total against your actual cash in the register plus GCash received plus any card settlements. When these three numbers add up to the same figure, your day closed clean. When they don't, something was missed or miscounted.
Pipable splits your daily income by payment method automatically when you upload the POS screenshot. If your GCash for the day shows ₱2,400 in Pipable but your GCash app shows ₱2,600, you know to investigate two ₱100 payments that may have been missed.