Biller

Restaurant Expense Management in India: Tracking Purchases, Bills and Staff Salaries on Biller.app

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Billing software is very good at telling you what came in. Ask it what actually stayed with you at the end of the month and most of it goes quiet -- which is how an outlet ends a busy week feeling successful and ends the month wondering where the money went. Biller.app keeps the other half of the ledger on the same account as the billing: what you bought, what you pay every month, and what your team costs you.

A card headed 'Sales are only half the story. Log what goes out, too.' showing the three things you log on the Expenses screen -- Add Purchase for stock, Add Bills for rent and electricity which can repeat, and Add Other Expense for one-off costs -- plus a note that staff salaries post themselves on a Monthly, Weekly or Daily cadence, the four Cash Flow lines (Sales, Taxes, Inventory Purchase, Expenses), and a footer stating the Expenses screen is Admin-only and kept per outlet

The three things you log

The Expenses screen has three buttons, and the split is deliberate -- it is the difference between money that bought you something, money that keeps the lights on, and money that just left.

  • Add Purchase -- stock and supplies you paid for. Vegetables, gas, packaging, a new set of crockery.
  • Add Bills -- rent, electricity, internet, the maintenance contract. The ones that come back.
  • Add Other Expense -- repairs, licence renewals, the plumber. The things that do not fit a pattern.

Each one asks for the same four things: a type you name yourself (the field is free text, so your categories are yours rather than ours), an amount, a date, and an optional note for why. The date picker will not let you pick a day in the future -- you can record something you forgot last Tuesday, but you cannot book next month's rent as though it has already gone out. Everything you log lands in the History list underneath, each row carrying a Correct button for when the amount was wrong. Worth knowing: that list is a working window of the last seven days, not your whole archive. Older entries have not gone anywhere -- they still count in full towards the Insights totals below -- they are simply not what that screen is for.

The ones that come back every month

Rent does not need re-typing twelve times a year. When you add a Bill there is a Repeat on this day every month toggle; switch it on and the bill posts itself on that date each month without you opening the app.

Editing a repeated bill later asks you one extra question -- Also change this for future bills. Leave it off and you have corrected this month only, which is what you want when the electricity bill came in higher than usual. Switch it on and you have changed the standing amount going forward, which is what you want when the landlord raises the rent. The distinction matters more than it looks: it is the difference between fixing a typo and rewriting your rent.

Staff salaries post themselves

Salaries are usually the largest thing a restaurant forgets to count, because they are paid out of the drawer and never written down anywhere the software can see. On Biller.app they are set once on the Team screen, next to the person: a Salary amount and a Salary Cadence.

The cadence options are the ones an Indian outlet actually runs on -- Monthly, Weekly, and Daily (daily wager) -- plus No auto-expense, which is the default and opts the person out entirely. Pick one and that person's pay appears in your expense list each period on its own, marked as a salary, without anybody remembering to add it.

A few things worth knowing about how it behaves, because they are the questions people ask second:

  • Each team member has exactly one salary entry behind them. Changing the amount updates that one rather than creating a competing second one, so you never end up paying somebody twice on paper.
  • A change in salary applies from the next period onward. It does not quietly rewrite months you have already closed and looked at.
  • Setting somebody back to No auto-expense, or removing them from the team, stops future postings. It does not erase what was already recorded -- last month still shows what last month cost.

Who can see any of this

Nobody except an Admin. Of the four roles -- Admin, Cashier, Waiter, Kitchen -- only Admin can open the Expenses screen, add to it, correct it or delete from it. The other three are refused the data outright, not merely shown a hidden menu, so a cashier working your counter cannot read your rent, your margins or what you pay the person standing next to them.

That is the same role model the rest of the app uses; our guide to the four roles covers what each one can and cannot reach elsewhere.

Where it all adds up

Logging costs is only worth doing if something reads them back to you. Insights has two views that do.

Expenses breaks the period into the same three buckets you logged -- Bills, Purchases, Other Expense -- and puts the previous period beside it, so you are comparing this month against last rather than staring at a number with no context.

Cash Flow is the wider one, with four lines: Sales, Taxes, Inventory Purchase and Expenses, again shown next to the period before. Alongside it a chart tracks income against outgoings over the range you pick.

One distinction that trips people up, so it is worth stating plainly: Inventory Purchase and Purchases are not the same line. Inventory Purchase is stock you received through inventory -- typically raised as a purchase order to a supplier and counted into stock. A Purchase on the Expenses screen is money you spent that you are not tracking as stock. Both are real costs and both are subtracted; they are just recorded in different places, and Cash Flow keeps them apart so you can see which is which.

Each outlet keeps its own

Expenses belong to the outlet you logged them against, exactly like its menu, stock and team. Your Koramangala rent does not turn up in your Whitefield numbers, and switching outlets switches the expense history with it. If you are running more than one location, our multi-outlet guide covers what is separate and what is shared.

What this is not

Being straight about the edges is more useful than a longer feature list:

  • It is not an accounting package and it does not file anything for you. It records what you spent and shows you the totals; your accountant still does the accounting. For what a compliant invoice needs on the sales side, see our GST billing guide.
  • Delivery-aggregator payouts do not flow in automatically. We do not have Zomato or Swiggy integration today, so aggregator commission and settlements are something you would log yourself.
  • There is no consolidated view that sums expenses across every outlet at once -- the numbers are per outlet, checked one at a time.

Bottom line

Three buttons for what you spend, a toggle for the costs that repeat, and salaries that post themselves on a monthly, weekly or daily-wager cadence -- all of it visible only to an Admin, kept per outlet, and read back as Bills versus Purchases versus Other Expense and as a cash-flow line against the period before. It will not do your books. It will stop you from guessing.