Other than monetary transactions, bars have always been notorious for internal theft and pilferage in the US. And since bars deal with costly inventory items, any sort of misappropriations or negligence can cost you more than you think. This makes managing your bar inventory diligently one of the most essential parts of restaurant management.
While inventory management is in itself a tricky task, managing a bar is even more difficult. However, you can make the process seamless with the help of a robust restaurant management system that comes with an efficient stock and inventory management feature. It will help you with an end to end management and keep you informed with real-time reports that will help you to keep a keen eye on the inventory operations.
An intelligent restaurant POS should provide you with real-time reports of your inventory count right on your mobile. With comprehensive consumption reports, perpetual inventory forms, recipe costing cards, expiry reports, waste sheets, and variance reports you can very effectively keep a tap on your inventory section. And these will not only help you manage your inventory but will also help you keep your liquor costs under check to a great extent.
National Restaurants Association (NRA) emphasizes the importance of tracking costs with inventory reports. And getting the reports will be seamless once you have an intelligent restaurant POS in place.
5 Ways Technology Helps You Manage Your Bar Inventory
In the US restaurant industry, where there is so much competition to deal with on a regular basis, managing bar inventory can get overwhelming at times. Here, we will tell you how a robust technology will help you manage your inventory with ease, and in turn, reduce your expenses to a great extent.
1. Consumption Report
A consumption report is that a comprehensive repository of inventory data that will help you manage your inventory counts right at one place. Get on board a technology that is equipped to provide you with this report. This is essentially a report that will tell you about the detailed count of the stock that comes in, the amount and the price at which it was purchased, the amount that got wasted in the process, and the quantity that was returned to the base kitchen or to the vendor for specific reasons.
2. Perpetual Inventory Form
It is a form that keeps the accounts of the available stock after each purchase or sale. The report contains a table with 11 columns and as many rows as you have brands of items. This inventory form provides a highly detailed view of changes in inventory with immediate reporting of the amount of inventory in stock, and accurately reflects the level of goods at hand. This report makes it really easy for restaurants to use the economic order quantity (EOQ) to purchase inventory. This is that formula that managers use to decide when to purchase stock, and EOQ considers the cost to hold inventory, as well as the firm’s cost to order stock.
3. Recipe Costing Card
All restaurants strive hard to find ways to reduce their liquor cost, and having a stellar POS will make your attempts rather seamless. This card contains the detailed liquor recipe of all your bar items, the ingredients that go into the preparing a cocktail, the quantity of each item that needs to be used and even the things that will be used for garnishing.
Recipe costing card contains the cost of each item as purchased, the size of the portion, the cost of the portion, the selling price and the liquor cost percentage. These are that robust report that will come handy in training your new bartenders in effective ways that will reduce the instances to incurring unwanted bar wastage to a great extent.
4. Waste Sheets
Generation of unwanted bar waste, from overpouring or spillage, can burn a hole in your pockets. And since bar inventory items are extremely heavy on pockets, it becomes quite necessary for you to keep the generation of waste to the minimum, which will help you control your liquor cost to a great extent. An efficient POS that provides you with a waste sheet, which should contain the detailed information about all the items that were wasted, why it was wasted, and how much that waste costs, will help you curb your bar waste exponentially. The moment you start tracking the waste generated, you will see there will be a drop in the generation of waste, which will reduce your bar costs as well. In addition to this, once you start keeping a check on the waste generated, your restaurant employees will start following the preparation techniques diligently.
5. Variance Report
A restaurant management system that is capable of providing you with a variance report will come in handy in managing your bar inventory in ways more than one. This report will give you the difference between the ideal stock that should be consumed during a day and the actual physical stock that remains at the end.
The liquor consumption reports will give you detailed accounts of the amount of actual stock consumed. Following which you can monitor and view the variance reports that provides the difference between the ideal stock that should be consumed during a day and the actual physical stock that remains at the end. This will help you track any misappropriations that might be happening in your bar inventory behind your back.
Restaurateurs in the US are striving hard to reduce their ever-increasing expenditure. Once you have a robust POS on board, that provides you with the above-mentioned reports, it will enable you to keep your beverage costs in check.
