The first branch pays for it

The coast season opens this month, and with it a familiar accounting problem.

A Cairo restaurant takes a unit on the North Coast for the summer. The deposit, the fit-out, the summer staff, the two managers pulled west for ten weeks, the opening discounts, the app commission on a delivery radius that is mostly sand. All of it is real money and almost none of it gets a line of its own. It leaves the same bank account as everything else, coded to the business, which in the books means coded to the Cairo branch.

So by August the founder is reading a set of numbers that say the Cairo restaurant is in trouble, in the exact months it is funding the other one.

What happens next is the part I find hardest to watch, because the conversation is about Cairo. Cut its marketing, it is the softest line in the file. Question the manager, he has had a bad quarter. Put the prices down, or put a discount on the app and hold the covers up.

Nobody says the sentence that would explain the whole thing, because saying it needs a second column that was never created.

That column is not missing through incompetence. It is missing because the person keeping the books is usually the person doing the rota, and opening a cost centre for a three-month unit feels like bureaucracy inside one small company with one bank account. It costs an afternoon in a spreadsheet. That is the entire price.

A second location launched inside the first one's number makes the first one look like the problem. The line has to exist before the first receipt, because a reconciliation in September is an argument, and a cost centre in June is a fact.