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With food costs on the rise, the most successful restaurant companies take great care to manage
their inventory. Waste, poor portion control, and theft can
take a heavy toll on your bottom line, but without inventory software, they can be hard
to detect. SpeedLine Inventory can help you pinpoint
where food losses are happening, but it does more than that—it also tracks how much you
pay for every item you receive, so it can tell you your margins on every product you
sell. Preparing to use inventory software requires
an investment of time, but the return on that investment can be great. Restaurant consultants
estimate that inventory software will typically save 1 to 2%, and could save up to 5% of sales
in straight profit. If time and staff are limited, you can choose
to restrict tracking to only high-cost items like cheese and meats.
Once the setup is complete, the key to inventory success is training staff to carry out daily
processes. When a shipment arrives, your receiver can
quickly add the received items from a supplier, a purchase order, or a list of all stocked
items. With some suppliers, receives can be done automatically by importing a file.
Receiving stock obviously increases stock levels, but what reduces them? Ideally, your
stock levels reflect actual usage in the recipes of the items you sell. On the make table,
staff training is key. Your inventory software will show you how accurately staff are sticking
to recipes and measuring ingredients. SpeedLine lets you print recipes on make tickets to
help with this. It’s also crucial to account for waste and
spoilage. You can do that by adjusting for waste in SpeedLine Inventory.
When you sell a large pepperoni pizza, SpeedLine Inventory uses your recipe information to
reduce the expected stock levels of pepperoni, cheese, and the other ingredients based on
what should “ideally” have been used if the recipe was followed accurately—this
is what inventory software calls “ideal usage.”
At the end of your inventory period, you count stock on the shelves. Choose to count all
items, certain categories, or only items you mark as critical. You can list the items in
the order they’re stored in your cooler, freezer, and shelves.
When you post the count batch, SpeedLine compares your actual stock levels to expected levels.
And that’s where you see the payoff—in the detailed stock level and food cost information
you get in your Inventory reports. Run the Usage Variance report to detect problems
with portion control, waste, or theft. See the current value of all your stock with
the Stock Valuation report. And SpeedLine Inventory and Sales Mix work
together to show you the food cost, price, and margin for each of your menu items in
a Product Margin report. With a time investment of as little as 30
minutes a week, you can get serious about controlling food costs. Talk to your SpeedLine
account rep today about Inventory.