Eliminate Shrinkage, Properly Control Inventory and Increase Bottom Line!

Sept. 4, 2009 - PRLog -- One major aspect to running a profitable restaurant is managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and equipment. With these, food can be the most difficult cost to handle.

To handle food costs effectively, an operator will need to monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order simultaneously.

An inventory software will help you identify specifically when your food costs are out of line. With an inventory software, typically you'll save 1% to 2% of sales, and can save even more. And it is savings that adds up to your bottom line as profit.

Using a POS-based inventory control system operators can spot and solve food cost difficulties that might not become clear by simply focusing on portion control. And when your staff know that the system is carefully keeping track, it stop waste as well as theft.

A single restaurateur will be able to realize this lesson, when it comes to food cost problems, probably a week of using inventory control software.

Inside his restaurant, he can be portion controlling, yield testing and making physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he began using inventory software that he noticed his inventory was out by exactly 2 pounds of pasta each week; coincidentally, the exact weight of a box. Knowing that, it was relatively easy to determine the source of the problem: one of the prep cooks was helping himself to a box of goodies every Friday night.

Your bottom line

An inventory control program, in a typical restaurant POS, the operator simply starts by entering their recipes and product costs to the system. The system then tracks the restaurant's ideal usage according on those recipes and actual sales.

The software also can track product usage in situations where some orders don’t conform to a standard recipe. The operator can then do a physical inventory and generate reports in order to compare it with the calculated ideal usage to be able to spot their differences. The operator can even set the software to track any number of item he wants.

Mostly in restaurants, in their top 10 items 80% of their food cost problem. And you can schedule nightly counts of key items and weekly or even monthly counts of some other items.

Even an ounce of over-portioning 1 item per order can mean hundreds of dollars in a month for restaurants. If an item is running $1.67 per pound, eliminating over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days could add up to more than $300.00 in savings or $3600.00 per year!

Keeping a better track and control also can help an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand, reducing waste and freeing up cash for other things. Losses due to carrying too much excess inventory can add up to a loss of between 2 percent and 5 percent on an average operator’s profit-and-loss statement.

We've assisted a client before who's menu is fairly extensive and had lots of work for setting up, but after helping them program their system properly, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – all of which went to their bottom-line profits.

So if you already have a restaurant POS system or are deciding on a purchase make sure you know how to and understand the additional profits that you can acquire by learning and properly using the inventory module of the system.

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The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20  years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits..

Visit http://www.pos-for-restaurants.com for more information on how our national network of restaurant point of sale professionals can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times.

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