The margin game: Why financial control is critical for UAE hospitality
In the hyper-competitive UAE hospitality industry, success isn’t just about how many rooms are booked or tables are turned. It’s about managing expenses with surgical precision. Whether you’re overseeing a boutique hotel in Dubai or a growing chain of restaurants across Abu Dhabi, hospitality financial control in the UAE has become the key to survival.
From soaring rents to seasonal customer demand and tight supplier contracts, there are constant threats to already slim profit margins. And when financial operations are still manual or fragmented, it becomes even harder to maintain control.
Pemo was built with these exact challenges in mind; giving hospitality leaders the tools to operate more efficiently, with total spend visibility and faster decision-making.
The 3 biggest financial leaks in hotels & restaurants
1. Uncontrolled OPEX and petty cash
Daily operations in hotels and restaurants depend on small, frequent purchases; emergency kitchen restocks, guest toiletries, and maintenance supplies. These are often paid from petty cash, leaving little to no trace.
Managing petty cash in hotels can be chaotic. Receipts go missing, approvals happen after the fact, and finance teams waste hours reconciling expenses that should’ve been visible from day one.
With Pemo, petty cash becomes a thing of the past. Site-level managers can be equipped with smart corporate cards and tight spend controls, making every dirham traceable.
2. Inefficient F&B supplier and vendor payments
Hospitality businesses in the UAE rely on a network of suppliers for food, beverages, linens, maintenance, and more. But these relationships are often managed through manual invoices, paper documents, and disorganized bank transfers.
This slows down procurement, delays payments, and leads to errors. Without a central system, F&B supplier payments are inconsistent and difficult to track, especially across multiple sites.
Pemo simplifies this by automating invoice processing. All supplier invoices can be received, approved, and paid from a single dashboard, giving finance teams full control.
3. Lack of real-time visibility across multiple sites
Multi-site restaurant finance teams face a constant uphill battle. Reports arrive days or weeks late, often in different formats, making it nearly impossible to get a consolidated view of spending.
Without real-time visibility, budgets are routinely blown before anyone realizes what happened. CFOs are forced to make reactive decisions with outdated data.
Pemo fixes this by giving finance leaders a live dashboard showing every expense across all properties, departments, and teams; instantly and accurately.
A modern toolkit for hospitality finance: From chaos to control
To win in the UAE hospitality sector, businesses must adopt modern financial tools that simplify operations and improve oversight. That’s where a unified spend management platform like Pemo makes all the difference.
We help hotel and restaurant teams replace outdated tools with smart, integrated solutions built for hospitality-specific challenges.
Solution: Smart corporate cards for site managers and staff
Smart corporate cards from Pemo eliminate the need for petty cash. You can issue pre-funded cards to general managers, kitchen leads, or procurement staff with:
- Custom spending limits
- Merchant category restrictions (e.g., only F&B suppliers)
- Real-time spend tracking and instant card freezing
This gives finance teams complete control while empowering staff to make necessary purchases quickly and safely.
Solution: Automated invoice processing for all F&B suppliers
Managing supplier payments manually costs both time and money. Pemo’s automated invoice processing allows you to:
- Receive and review all vendor invoices in one place
- Digitally approve and schedule payments
- Track spending by vendor, category, or site
This helps hospitality teams pay faster, reduce human error, and keep supplier relationships strong.
Solution: A real-time dashboard for multi-site visibility
Pemo’s real-time dashboard gives CFOs and finance teams live visibility into spend across every hotel or restaurant in the group. You can:
- Compare budget vs. actuals per site
- Identify overspending early
- Make strategic adjustments in real time
Whether you're managing two properties or twenty, Pemo ensures you're never in the dark.
Case study: How a Dubai restaurant chain could cut food costs by 10%
Let’s suppose a mid-sized restaurant group in Dubai operates ten locations. Each site handles its own vendor payments and uses petty cash for daily needs. The finance team only sees expense data at the end of the month, making proactive cost control nearly impossible.
After adopting Pemo, the business could:
- Replace petty cash with smart corporate cards, reducing untracked spending
- Automate all F&B supplier payments to speed up procurement and avoid duplicate payments
- Use real-time data to spot expensive vendor trends and renegotiate rates
Within a few months, this visibility could allow the team to cut waste, improve planning, and potentially reduce food costs by up to 10%; all by using Pemo as their central finance tool.
Conclusion: Serve up profitability with smarter spend control
In 2025, the most profitable hospitality businesses in the UAE won’t be the ones with the flashiest décor or fanciest menus. They’ll be the ones who use technology to control every dirham.
Pemo UAE helps hotels and restaurants achieve real financial control, from managing OPEX to optimizing supplier payments and improving visibility across locations.
Take control of your hotel or restaurant's finances
Want to streamline operations, protect your margins, and ditch the cash box? Book a demo with Pemo and see how we help hospitality businesses like yours transform spend management from reactive to proactive.
