Managing your inventory involves knowing precisely what you have, what you paid for it, where it is, and when you sold it. To fully understand this you need to accurately monitor your inventory from the moment it comes through the back door until it is sold to your customer. Today, the easiest and most time efficient way to do this is with Restaurant Inventory Software.
Managing inventory requires organization and a paper trail. Without proper procedures and a restaurant inventory software package in place, you can easily lose track of your inventory. Tracking each item to get an actual cost (opening inventory plus purchases less closing counts) is simple, but tracking ideal (or theoretical) usage is time consuming and this is where restaurant inventory software really shines. Each menu item and recipe can be properly priced out and, once sold, the correct amount of stock can be extracted from inventory.
Inventory counting is a pain at best but a necessary evil in any retail operation. As a time saver, you can count only key items (top 30 or 100) as if these are controlled and everything else should follow suit. Most restaurant inventory software allows you to count what you want when you want, and in some cases just counting key items will go a long way to maximizing your profit.
Simple period counts, purchases and sales mix entries will go a long way to determining, period and monthly costs. In the old days of pen and paper, it was all a manager could do to calculate food costs on a monthly basis. Now with the click of a button, you can know exactly how much of every inventory item you used and, more importantly, what you should have used.
Because of restaurant inventory software, an effective time saving approach is to calculate your food and beverage costs weekly. If there is a problem, you know about it quickly and can respond accordingly. Weekly food cost reporting will change attitudes and behavior in your kitchen because of the awareness and sense of accountability it creates.
While tracking your inventory through its cycle is detailed and painstaking work, restaurant inventory software will help in saving time while providing the information you need as an operator to maximize profits and gain proper control. If it’s true that knowledge is power, then effectively exercising control over the use of your inventory with restaurant inventory software is the ultimate weapon.
