A good way to make more profits and run your restaurant to success is by managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and supplies. With these, probably the most difficult cost to control is food.
In order to manage 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 exactly when your food costs are out of line. Using inventory control software will typically save you 1 to 2 percent of sales, and might save you much more. And it is savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.
A POS-based inventory control system operators can spot and solve food cost difficulties that might not become noticeable by simply focusing on portion control. And when your employees 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, at least a week of using an inventory control software.
In his restaurant, he was portion controlling, yield testing and performing 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 blue marlin every week; coincidentally, it’s the same weight as a box. Upon knowing, it was relatively that easy to pinpoint the source of the problem: one of the prep cooks was stashing a box of goodies every Friday night.
Boosting the bottom line
In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory control program, the operator sets up the software by first entering their recipes and product costs. The system then can track ideal usage based on those recipes and the restaurant’s actual sales.
The inventory control software can aslo track product usage in situations where some orders is not in line with the standard recipe. The operator can then do a physical inventory and generate reports comparing it with the calculated ideal usage to check their differences. The software can also be set up to track as many items as the operator chooses.
Mostly in restaurants, their top 10 items 80 percent 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 a month. If you eliminate over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days on a .67 per pound of a single item, could add up to more than 0.00 in savings or 00.00 in a 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. Carrying too much inventory can cause 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 by helping them program correctly, 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 have a restaurant POS system or are contemplating a purchase make sure you understand the additional profits that you can acquire and the “how to’s” by learning and using the inventory module of the system as you should be.
The author of this article is the VP of Customer Relations at POS-Fof-Restaurants.com with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale (POS) helping restaurants nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits.
To learn on how our national POS network of restaurant point of sale experts can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times, visit POS-For-Restaurants.com.
