Using your restaurant POS system to control inventory

Sept. 4, 2009 - PRLog -- Using your restaurant POS system to control inventory

A good way to make more profits and successfully running your restaurant is by managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and supplies. Of those, one can assume the hardest cost to control is food.

Simultaneously monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order efficiently should be done in order to manage food costs effectively.

An inventory software will help you identify specifically when your food costs are out of line. With an inventory software, you'll typically save 1% to 2% of sales, and could save you much more. And it’s savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.

POS-based inventory control system operators can spot and solve food cost problems that might not become evident by simply focusing on portion control. When your staff knows that the system is keeping track, it discourages both waste and theft.

When experiencing food cost problems, a restaurateur will most likely to learn this lesson after a week of using inventory control software.

In his restaurant, he would be portion controlling, yield testing and conducting physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he uses an inventory software where he finds out his inventory was out by exactly 20 pounds of pasta every week; coincidentally, the exact weight of a box. Upon knowing, it was relatively that easy to determine the source of the problem: a prep cook who was helping himself to a box of shrimp every Saturday evening.

Improving your bottom line

In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory control program, an operator sets up the software by first entering their recipes and product costs. 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 then can do a physical inventory and generate reports comparing that inventory with the calculated ideal usage in order to identify variances. The operator can even set the software to track any quantity of items he wants.

In a majority of 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.

With just one item, over-portioning by 1 ounce per order may cost a restaurant hundreds of dollars in a month. 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!

Reduce waste and free up cash for other things! So you better have a good which can help an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand. By carrying too much inventory causes a loss of between 2 percent and 5 percent on an average operator’s profit-and-loss statement.

According to one of our clients it was a lot of effort to set up because they have a fairly extensive menu, but after helping them with proper programming, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – it's a big plus for their bottom line profits.

So if you're using a restaurant POS system or are deciding on a purchase make sure you understand the additional profits that you can gain and the "how to's" by learning and using the inventory module of the system properly.

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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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