Taking inventory is hardly the most exciting part of running a restaurant. And when things get busy, it’s one of the tasks you’ll struggle to find time for. It’s understandable you don’t want to waste time taking inventory, but you’ll quickly discover waiting until you run out of something before you reorder it, will only cause frustration for you, your employees, and your customers.
Restaurant inventory software can help you tremendously with the daunting – and boring – task of doing inventory. With the right inventory product, you should be able to keep up with your inventory as it comes and goes without having to actually put your eyes on it. This can be especially helpful when you keep inventory in more than one place.
Restaurant inventory software can help streamline your business in more ways than you realize. When you track your restaurant’s inventory with specially designed software, you can plan your menu more easily, incorporating surplus items into more dishes while avoiding shortages of commonly used ingredients.
With inventory software, you can get a better idea of where food items might be costing you too much money. For example, you can track how much of a given item you are buying versus how much you are using over a week, month, or a longer amount of time. You can also see if there are items you buy regularly but are not getting used – items you can stop buying altogether or buy less frequently.
Your inventory is what keeps your restaurant running consistently. Knowing your cost of goods sold, or COGS, will help you grow your business and maintain consistent expenses even when profits fluctuate.
Restaurant inventory software should help you keep up with several features of your items and supplies. With the click of a button or the tap of a screen, you should be able to enter the name of the item, the unit of measure, how many of the items or units you have, the unit price, and the total cost of your inventory on hand. Keeping track of these things by hand can be very tedious, but a software program can make it incredibly easy to manage your entire inventory on a mobile device.
Another benefit of restaurant inventory software is it will help you identify items which were bought first so they can be used first, eliminating the possibility of unused being thrown out because it is ruined or expired.
There are many reasons to choose restaurant inventory software, but ultimately it boils down to making your life as a restaurant owner or manager easier!