A chart of accounts that survives a real café or retail shop.

A chart of accounts (COA) is the named list of categories your accounting system uses to bucket every transaction. Revenue, COGS, rent, electricity, owner draw — each is an account. Bookkeepers love long charts (everything in its place). Owners love short charts (everything I can actually use). For a small café or retail shop, 25-30 accounts is enough. More than that and you'll stop using it.

TL;DR

What a chart of accounts is, in plain English

Every accounting system organises money by accounts. An account is a labelled bucket. "Rent" is an account. "Coffee beans" is an account. "Card terminal fees" is an account. When a transaction happens — a sale, a purchase, a wage payment — it goes into one of these buckets.

The chart of accounts is the named list of all available buckets, organised by type. The standard top-level groups (in accrual accounting):

• Assets — what the business owns (cash, inventory, equipment).
• Liabilities — what the business owes (loans, supplier credit, VAT payable).
• Equity — what the owner has put in or taken out.
• Revenue — what came in from sales.
• COGS / variable costs — what was consumed making the sales.
• Fixed costs / operating expenses — the bills that show up regardless of sales.

A formal P&L only uses the bottom three groups (revenue, COGS, fixed costs). The top three live on the balance sheet. For daily P&L tracking, you mostly only deal with the bottom three.

The sin of too many accounts

Open any "chart of accounts template for hospitality" download and you'll find 80-150 line items. Separate accounts for cold beverages, hot beverages, draught beer, bottled beer, premium spirits, well spirits, soft drinks, mixers, coffee, tea, water — and that's just bar revenue.

In theory this is more rigorous. In practice nobody uses it. Owners get tired of categorising every espresso into "hot beverages > coffee > espresso > single-shot" and start lumping everything into one bucket, defeating the point. Bookkeepers spend hours fixing miscategorisations.

The accountant's instinct is "more accounts = more visibility." The reality for an owner-operator is "more accounts = less consistency = no usable data at all." A chart of 28 accounts, used religiously, beats a chart of 120 accounts used haphazardly.

A 28-account chart for a small café

This is the chart I'd recommend for a single-location café doing €15-50k/month, fewer than 8 staff, no kitchen. It's deliberately spare. Adjust upward only when you need to.

Revenue (3 accounts)

Notice: revenue is split by VAT rate, not by product category. This is the split your tax filing actually needs. Splitting cappuccinos from lattes accomplishes nothing the daily report can't show with product-level data.

COGS / variable (5 accounts)

Fixed costs (15 accounts)

Below-the-line (5 accounts)

Twenty-eight accounts. Every transaction in a small café maps to one of them in 3 seconds or less. The codes follow the loose European convention (4xxx revenue, 5xxx COGS, 6xxx fixed costs, 7xxx below-the-line, 8xxx liabilities/equity, 9xxx assets) — your accountant may prefer a different numbering, which is fine. The names are what matter.

Variations for retail and salon

The skeleton is the same; the leaves change. For a small retail shop, the COGS line becomes more important and you usually want product-category splits. For a salon, the revenue side splits into services and products.

Retail (e.g. boutique, gift shop, bookshop)

• Revenue: split by product category (3-5 lines) — apparel, accessories, gifts, etc.
• COGS: matched to revenue categories (3-5 lines) — apparel COGS, accessories COGS, etc.
• Add: "Inventory shrinkage" account — theft, damage, write-offs.
• Add: "Packaging / shipping" — for online orders or click-and-collect.

Salon

• Revenue: split into services (cuts, colour, treatments) and product retail (shampoo, styling products).
• COGS: split into product cost for services (colour, treatment supplies) and product cost for retail.
• Add: "Stylist commissions" — usually variable, sometimes fixed depending on contract.
• Tips: should be pass-through, not revenue.

For one approach to a retail-specific chart, see how Petras Knitwear in Berlin handles seasonal categories — Petra splits revenue by yarn-weight category, which gives her clean restock data without bloating the COA.

How to actually use it daily

A chart of accounts only earns its keep if it's used consistently. Three habits:

1. 01
   Print it and post it

   Two copies — one by the till, one in the back office. Staff who handle petty cash should be able to glance at it and pick the right account. Reduces miscategorisation by half.

2. 02
   Tag every transaction same-day

   Bank transactions, supplier invoices, petty cash — categorise within 24 hours. The longer the gap, the more likely it ends up in "miscellaneous."

3. 03
   Quarterly chart review

   Every 3 months, look at which accounts are getting most traffic. If "miscellaneous" is more than 5% of transactions, you're missing an account. If an account has fewer than 4 transactions per quarter, consider merging it.

In nouz, you map your fixed costs and variable categories to your chart of accounts at setup. Each daily entry then flows into the right account automatically, and the P&L is generated from those mappings. The categories setup walkthrough takes about 20 minutes and you only do it once.

If you're currently using a 100-line chart from a template and quietly hating it: try this 28-account version for a month. Re-map your existing data, retire the dead accounts, see how it feels. Most owners who do this don't go back. And if you don't have a chart at all yet — start with this one. The version you actually use is the right one.

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