USD vs LBP: How to Price Your Menu During Currency Swings

Every restaurant and shop owner in Lebanon has run into the same problem: you set a price, the exchange rate moves, and now you're either losing money on every sale in lira, or manually updating prices every few days.

Here's how to actually handle it, based on what works for shops running dual-currency day to day.

Price the menu in dollars, always

Set your real prices in USD. That's your stable number — it doesn't move with the exchange rate, and it's the number you actually think in when you're costing out a dish or a product. LBP is what you display and accept at the register, calculated from the dollar price at the day's rate.

Snapshot the rate at the moment of sale, not the moment of pricing

This is the detail that trips people up. If you update your "official" exchange rate once a week but the real rate moves daily, your reports get inaccurate fast. The rate that matters is the one at the exact moment of each individual sale — that's what should get written to the receipt and the report, not a rate you set at the start of the week.

Done right, a sale made on Monday and a sale made on Thursday can use two different rates, and your books stay accurate for both, even though the number you had "set" never changed in between.

Let customers pay in either currency, split however they want

Don't force a choice. Some customers pay in dollars, some in lira, some want to split a bill across both. A cash drawer that tracks USD and LBP independently — not just one converted total — makes end-of-day reconciliation possible instead of a guessing game.

The mistake almost everyone makes early on

Rounding LBP prices to "clean" numbers by hand, sale by sale, at the register. It feels harmless until you've done it a few hundred times and your actual revenue doesn't match what your system says you sold. Let the system calculate the converted price consistently, every time, from the same snapshot rate — and only round at the very end, the same way, every time.