Proper Inventory Management Can Increase Your Bottom Line Profits

Here's One Good Reason Why You Should Use Athen can track ideal usage based on those recipes
Point of Sale Systemand the restaurant’s actual sales.
One important key to running a profitable restaurantThis software can aslo track product usage in
is managing the controllable costs, such as food, laborsituations where some orders is not in line with the
and supplies. Of those, it seems the toughest cost tostandard recipe. The operator then can do a physical
control is food.inventory and generate reports comparing that
Simultaneously monitor portion sizes, prevent theft,inventory with the calculated ideal usage in order to
watch waste and order efficiently should be done inspot variances. The software can also be set up to
order to manage food costs effectively.track as many items as the operator wants.
Inventory software will help you identify accuratelyGenerally in restaurants, their top 10 items 80
where your food costs are out of line. Usingpercent of their food cost problem. And you can
inventory control software will typically save you 1 toschedule nightly counts of key items and weekly or
2 percent of sales, and could save you much more.even monthly counts of some other items.
And it’s savings that drops straight to yourWith just one item, over-portioning by 1 ounce per
bottom line as profit.order could cost a restaurant hundreds of dollars a
A POS-based inventory control system operators canmonth. If an item is running $1.67 per pound,
spot and solve food cost difficulties that might noteliminating over-portioning on 100 orders per day for
become visible by simply focusing on portion control.30 days could add up to more than $300.00 in
When your staff knows that the system is keepingsavings or $3600.00 per year!
track, it discourages both waste and theft.Better tracking and controls also helps an operator
When experiencing food cost problems, areduce the amount of stock they keep on hand,
restaurateur will mostly learn this lesson after a weekreducing waste and freeing up cash for other things.
of using inventory control software.By carrying too much inventory could cause a loss of
In his restaurant, he can be portion controlling, yieldbetween 2 percent and 5 percent on an average
testing and performing physical inventory, but itoperator’s profit-and-loss statement.
wasn’t until he uses an inventory softwareAccording to one of our clients it was a lot of effort
where he learns that his inventory was out byto set up because they have a fairly extensive
exactly 20 pounds of lamb each week; coincidentally,menu, but once we helped them program properly,
it's the same weight as a box. Knowing that, it waswe were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4
relatively easy to determine the source of thepercent – all of which went to their bottom-line
problem: one of the prep cooks was helping himselfprofits.
to a box of goodies every Friday night.So if you have a restaurant POS system or are
Boosting your bottom linecontemplating a purchase make sure you know how
In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory controlto and understand the additional profits that you can
program, the operator sets up the software by firstacquire by learning and properly using the inventory
entering their recipes and product costs. The systemmodule of the system.