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Weekly Inventory Management System to Cut Food Cost & Reduce Theft

Written by: Nilesh Shah

Article Overview: Whether you run a take-away counter or a fine-dine restaurant, the amount of money you make depends to a sizable degree on how well you manage your food inventory. Food cost is often a restaurant’s largest single expense in the overall cost of running a restaurant.

Weekly Inventory Management System to Cut Food Cost & Reduce Theft

It’s easy and, unfortunately, common for restaurants to lose money through poor inventory management. Beginners are particularly exposed to this cash drain, since they often do not have their financial control systems secured. But even the most well-managed, established restaurants have ongoing challenges in this area.

Now, as a restaurateur, consider the challenges of dealing with food. First, your inventory is not like a plate of french fries at a bar counter. Most of it is highly perishable. Your ingredients have a limited shelf life, much of it less than a week, some as short as just a day or two.

Fail to use a product within this short time results in throwing it to trash along with some of your hard-earned profit. Further, you have a lot of people who handle your food inventory. From the time your products are ordered, received, stored, prepared and ultimately served to your customers, even a small restaurant may have atleast 15-20 people involved in the food production process.

The more people involved in taking “raw” inventory and converting it to the delivered product, the more difficult it is to control loss, waste and misuse of inventory. As the saying goes, "Too many cook, spoils the food", waste and theft become hidden problems, gradually eating your gross margins. And on the subject of theft, even a small eatery has dozens if not hundreds of raw and partially prepared food products in storage. You’re stocking lots of desirable products to which many people have access. Depending on size, nature, volume and recipes in your business, there’s a good chance that you’ll have between 200 and 500 different raw food products in your storage rooms that are of value to everyone. The more products you have, the more challenging it is to control their use. The more of anything you have, the less likely one or two items will be immediately missed.

A true inventory system have an interface to record your physical inventory and tallying it with your computer inventory. It also allows you to adjust the inventory if there is any discrepancy. It helps you to earn more by deriving smart ways to control and reduce inventory cost.

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Article Tags: cash drain, computer inventory, desirable products, food inventory, food production, food products, food waste, french fries, gross margins, inventory management, inventory system, nature volume, physical inventory, raw food, restaurateur, shelf life, spoils, storage rooms, time results, true inventory



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