If you own a restaurant or a cafe, one aspect of your business that can give you sleepless nights is inventory management. It is a tedious and time-consuming task with huge scope for errors. You don’t want to over order. You want to control cost and prevent wastage. You want profitability.
Managing the inventory of your restaurant or cafe is your business’ most critical activity. And yet the whole process is quite daunting. It consists of taking stock of and managing all the items or raw materials required to prepare the dishes and controlling and organizing each and every aspect of the stock including supply flow.
With the right point of sale solution, however, you can revolutionize your inventory operations, and achieve higher profits. Inventory management can be done at the touch of your fingertips. Not all point of sale has inventory management feature. The ones that do have should allow you to monitor, control, and track every little detail of your stock with ease.
How’d you know if the inventory management feature of your POS is up to the mark? We help you with a quick stock taking of your point of sale:
A cloud-based restaurant inventory management software helps you monitor your inventory live and provides real-time reporting of the stock consumed and available.
You can find out the difference between the required and available stock automatically and order accordingly. Too much of variance indicates that something might be off – think wastage or pilferage. Too less indicates low quality dishes.
You can set a reorder level for each of your items – receive a notification or alert. You can then reorder through your POS before you run out of supplies. This way you will never run out of supplies during operation hours and avoid over ordering.
Food business is extremely unpredictable. The only fixed element in such an uncertain environment is – the amount of ingredients that go into making a particular dish, besides the menu items of course.
A proper recipe management involves standardization and management of recipe. The recipe management module is integrated with the POS inventory management module and automatically calculates the amount of stock consumed in the preparation of a dish. Therefore, you can maintain a clear track of the items consumed based on the items ordered.
The module helps avoid frequent stock imbalance – important for maintaining consistent product quality. It also helps track pilferage. When food doesn’t get sold but goes off stock, you know what to do.
A POS should also make it easy for you to get a cost estimate of a dish with the help of the costing feature, which helps in deciding the selling price of the dish.
With an intelligent POS, managing food distribution in multiple outlets is no big deal. It helps you manage stock supplies across stores based on the requirements of the outlets – automatically.
You can easily manage the inventory at your franchise outlets – monitor and measure stock items in every outlet. Receiving outlet requirements, raising purchase orders, sending stocks to specific outlets – all information is made handy and action can be taken instantly.
An intelligent point of sale helps you manage the shelf life of items by notifying you of the shelf life of a particular item – this can vary from a few days (perishables) up to years (rice). Accordingly, you will know when to stop using them and raise purchase orders.
The reporting and analytics feature helps you to analyze inventory trends and forecast future plans and take informed decisions. Absence of forecast can lead to overstocking of food and beverage inventory and waste. Under stocking leads to low quality product and service.
An intelligent POS provides sales report and order history and, based on it, it can also give you an estimate of the amount of items that you need in a week or month. Automatic alerts and reminders help you re-order on time.
You can also monitor the daily and weekly usage of supplies and receive instant insights on the most popular ingredients and dishes and accordingly take the right action.
A user friendly, intelligent point of sale helps you get a handle on your flow of inventory like never before. You’ll be in control of stock inflow and stock outflow, identify amounts of wastage and pilferage, and so on.
With access to every little data in real-time, you will be able to compare actual usage with forecast and make adjustments to your purchases accordingly.
In summary, your POS should have a robust, user-friendly inventory management feature that can help you know how your business operates and, therefore, help reduce costs and increase profitability.
