What Your Accountant Wants in a Waste Log

They want rows, not a story

A good monthly pack is boring. One row per product per day, stable column names, prices that match the catalog, and no merged cells. Accountants lose time when the owner’s export changes shape every month or when “misc” hides a third of the value.

Lock the catalog before you log a month

Agree product names, units and cost prices with your bookkeeper once. If the window says “tradition” and the books say “baguette T65”, pick one label and keep it. Changing a cost price is fine. Changing the name of a product mid-series makes year-on-year comparison useless.

Selling price can move with the menu. Cost price should move when the recipe or supplier changes, and the change should apply to new rows only in the way you and your accountant agree.

The columns that answer a review

Date, product, category, quantity, unit, cost price, selling price, cost loss, retail loss. Category lets them group bread, pastry, savoury and raw ingredients. Unit stops someone adding kilogrammes of flour to a count of croissants. Cost loss is the figure they are most likely to book. Retail loss is the figure you use to manage the shop.

A PDF of the same rows is useful when someone wants a page to initial. The CSV is what goes into the ledger.

Close the month on a calendar they recognise

Export the same dates as the sales period, including days you were closed. A missing Sunday is fine if the shop is shut. A missing Thursday looks like a gap. If you operate more than one counter, keep the location on the file name: wastesheet-lyon-2026-05.csv.

Send it on the first working day of the next month. The shops that do this stop getting the “can you remind me what you threw away in March?” email.