ZATCA for restaurants: split bills, delivery apps and service charges

Restaurants issue invoice shapes that retail never encounters. Here is how each of them works under Phase 2.

The split bill

A table of five asks to pay separately. What you must not do is issue one invoice and five receipts.

Correct: each payer gets their ownsimplified tax invoice, each with its own UUID, its own place in the hash chain, its own stamp and its own QR. Five invoices, five reports.

This is why a POS without proper split-check support becomes a compliance issue and not just an inconvenience: staff work around it with a single invoice and hand-written notes, and now you have one invoice for a transaction that was five.

Wameed splits by item, equally, or by custom amount, and each split produces a complete compliant invoice.

Delivery aggregator orders

A Jahez or HungerStation order is not a normal counter sale, and the VAT treatment depends on your commercial arrangement with the platform. Broadly there are two models:

• You sell to the customer, the platform provides delivery and charges you a commission. You issue the tax invoice for the food; the platform issues you an invoice for their commission, on which you may have input VAT.
• You sell to the platform, the platform sells to the customer. Your invoice is to the platform.

Which one applies is determined by your contract, not by your POS.Get your accountant to confirm which model each of your platforms uses, because they are not all the same and the treatment differs.

What your POS must do either way: bring the order in as a distinct channel, produce the correct document, and keep the commission separate from revenue so your reports are not overstating sales.

Service charge

If you add a service charge, it is generally part of the consideration for the supply and is treated accordingly for VAT. Discretionary tips paid directly by the customer to staff are a different matter.

Two practical rules:

1. Show the service charge as its own line on the invoice, not folded into prices.
2. Confirm the treatment with your accountant once, configure it once, and stop thinking about it.

Tips

A tip added to a card payment passes through your till, which is where it becomes a question. Your POS should record it separately from revenue so that your sales reports, your VAT and your staff payouts all come from the right number. Do not treat tips as sales.

Voids, comps and staff meals

Three different things, often handled as one, and each has consequences:

• A void before the invoice is issued — no document, no report. This is fine, and it is also the thing to monitor for internal control, because voiding after the customer paid cash is the oldest trick in the trade.
• A cancellation after the invoice is issued — a credit note. See thecredit note guide.
• A comp or a staff meal — this is not a zero-price sale. Talk to your accountant about the right treatment; your POS should at minimum record it as a distinct category so it does not silently distort cost of sales.

Peak-hour outages

Restaurant revenue concentrates into a few hours. An outage at 8:40pm on a Thursday costs several times what the same outage costs on a Tuesday morning.

Because restaurant sales are almost entirelysimplified invoices, you can keep issuing during an outageprovided your system signs on the device. See theoffline rules and theoffline comparison.

The specific restaurant risk is that the outage also hits the kitchen display. Wameed's KDS needs the local server — we say so plainly. Your fallback for that hour is printed tickets, and the printers should be wired rather than on wifi for exactly this reason.

Multiple branches, one brand

Each terminal in each branch needs its own certificate. Ten branches with three tills each is thirty onboardings and thirty expiry dates. Keep a register; your back office should show it. See theonboarding guide.

A restaurant compliance checklist

1. Each split payer receives their own complete invoice
2. Aggregator channels produce the correct document for your contract model
3. Service charge is its own line with a confirmed treatment
4. Tips are recorded outside revenue
5. Voids, credit notes and comps are three distinct things in your reports
6. Every terminal is onboarded, and expiry dates are tracked
7. Offline issuance tested by unplugging the router during a quiet service
8. Weekly: scan a receipt, check rejections, check the unreported count

More on how Wameed handles restaurants on thefeatures page, and the compliance detail on theZATCA page.

Not tax advice; confirm VAT treatment with your accountant or ZATCA.