When evaluating food service management software, it’s important to choose a robust, comprehensive system that works for your business. In this page, we’ll discuss the challenges of food service management, an overview of MarketMan as your ideal solution, and the benefits that MarketMan provides.

Challenges of the Food Service Industry

As a restaurant owner, catering provider, or other food service operator, you face many challenges and juggle many tasks. You need to maintain consistent profitability, control food and labor costs, manage your inventory, maintain relationships with vendors, and keep up with customer expectations.

In an industry with tight margins, lowering costs on a continual basis is key to staying afloat. However, you have to focus on making your guests happy and don’t have hundreds of hours to invest in manual labor and data entry for your back-of-house operations.

That’s where an investment in technology will save you time and money, while enabling good habits. Food service management software will optimize your food production, perform inventory management, and boost profit margins. The right solution will allow you to automate these operations, freeing you up to focus on delighting customers and growing your business.

MarketMan- Your Complete Food Service Management Solution

One such food service management software solution is MarketMan.MarketMan is the leading back-of-house solution that provides restaurateurs and other foodservice operators complete control over inventory, supply management, and procurement; ultimately empowering restaurateurs to manage more, faster.Our cloud-based inventory management and purchasing solution simplifies all back-of-house operations, streamlining everything from inventory to reporting, supplier management and budgeting.In short, MarketMan helps restaurants keep costs under control and manage inventory efficiently by automating back-of-house operations.

Streamline Processes with Restaurant Inventory Management

MarketMan is a full-lifecycle inventory management tool, tracking inventory at time of purchase, receiving, inventory counts, and depletion of inventory from sales on your POS.

With MarketMan, inventory counts can be taken via web or the mobile app. Count stock easily by scanning barcodes, or simply entering the quantity on hand into the app. You can also streamline your shelf-to-sheet inventory counts by categorizing your inventory by storage area, category, units, packs, cases, and other filters. This enables you to know your inventory quantity and value in real-time, enabling good habits and processes.You can also get alerts when your inventory items run low, below a predetermined threshold. This allows you to automatically know when to reorder so that you always have the ingredients necessary to make your sales.MarketMan also allows you to track waste and theft, which reduces shrinkage and unforeseen costs.Through MarketMan’s inventory management capabilities, you can find inefficiencies and make corrections to streamline your processes, reducing food costs and maximizing profits.

Increase Operational Efficiency with Procurement, Vendor Management, and AP Automation

Not only does MarketMan streamline your inventory management, but you can also increase your efficiency with managing vendors, purchase ordering, receiving, reconciliation, and invoice scanning.

Procurement & Vendor Management

In MarketMan, there’s a one-stop-shop ordering functionality where chefs and managers can submit purchase orders, check statuses, and manage vendors anytime, anywhere.You can submit purchase orders using the web or mobile interfaces on MarketMan. Simply click on the suppliers, categories, or items that you want added or simply fill to par with one click of a button. Suppliers will receive standardized purchase orders via API, EDI, excel sheet, email, test, or even fax. MarketMan also provides permission settings so you can approve or reject every order before it goes out to your suppliers.

With MarketMan’s purchase ordering capabilities, you can reduce order time, control your budget, and track costs while preventing overspending.On the flip side, there is also receiving and reconciliation. When delivery arrives, MarketMan automatically reconciles delivered items with on-hand levels in your storage. This purchase order and invoice reconciliation platform tracks price changes, updates stock levels, and categorizes invoices in real time. It’s handy for perpetual inventory and tracking shorts, subs, and credits.

AP Automation

In MarketMan, you can also do accounts payable automation. You can scan, capture, and manage all invoices through the MarketMan mobile app.

AP automation with MarketMan means invoice scanning with automatic reporting. Simply snap a photo or upload a copy of your delivery invoices and MarketMan does the rest. MarketMan automatically updates items and quantities received even without manual entry.With AP automation in MarketMan, you can eliminate data entry, streamline processes, track prices, increase accuracy, improve data security, and provide accessibility.Marketman also performs vendor management by allowing you to track purchasing and prices. You can proactively track periodical spend with each of your vendors by location and by item to ensure every price change doesn’t go undetected. You can get granular and track spend on each item, and set food cost levels so your menu items remain profitable.This provides you visibility and accountability to your ingredient and food prices and helps you manage your relationship with your vendors.

Improve Profits and Cash Flow with Business Insights and Reports

MarketMan contains robust, real-time reports to help maximize profits, reduce costs, and improve cash flow at your restaurant.MarketMan’s reporting and analytics tools provide total visibility over all aspects of your business. Make faster, smarter decisions with automated analytics based on sales, expense, purchasing, and menu reporting. Extract actionable data through our menu profitability, actual vs. theoretical, COGS and Gross Profits reports, and more.The Menu Profitability Report is a recipe and food cost report that showcases margins and profits (menu item by menu item). It’s a snapshot of your menu’s performance in a certain period of time that you set.

You can compare your food costs for food items and menu items side-by-side and pinpoint ways to make more profits (for example, selling more items with lower food costs). With the menu profitability report, you can easily analyze your food costs at a glance and make necessary changes.The Actual vs. Theoretical (Variance Report) is a comparison summary showcasing discrepancies between theoretical usage and actual usage in your inventory levels. In this report, you can find the difference between your theoretical and actual costs, and see what is causing the difference.

By comparing your sales information against your inventory counts for a certain time period, you can see whether there’s any type of product misappropriation that’s not going to its intended purpose—to serve customers. For example, you can find out whether you have a waste, over-portioning, or theft issue.And along with a waste report within MarketMan, you can analyze your logged waste events and reasons, see what’s causing high variance levels, and reduce waste in the future.The Waste Report tells you your total waste in dollars in a particular time period, compares it to previous periods, and indicates what percent of your total purchases you are wasting. The Waste Report is another way that you can look at your habits and patterns and adjust it to reduce waste and be more efficient.

The COGS and Gross Profits report takes purchasing, inventory counts, and sales data to tell you what COGS and gross profits are (solely on purchasing and sales on aggregate and counts). You can see your overall COGS, revenue, and profits, as well as a breakdown of these numbers by categories and at the inventory item level. You can examine your overall COGS figure to seeif it’s too high, and then drill down into categories and individual items to see what’s causing the expense.

The COGS and Gross Profits Report, along with a Purchase by Items report, also gives you insight into your actual usage vs. your purchasing patterns. By examining these two data points, you can improve your purchasing to match your historical usage of inventory, lowering your costs, reducing waste, and improving your cash flow.Finally, you can use the Price Report and Price Change report to help manage your suppliers. These reports allow you to see the changes in prices per inventory item and per supplier, so that you can find the suppliers that are the most reliable and cost-effective and try to negotiate your prices down (and ultimately, lower your food costs).Overall, MarketMan’s reporting capabilities provide actionable insights that help drive smarter business decisions.

Integrate with Accounting and POS Systems

MarketMan provides a wide selection of out-of-box integrations with the most popular POS, Accounting software, and other systems such as online ordering. Furthermore, MarketMan’s open API facilitates custom and flexible integrations with BI solutions. MarketMan integrates with many POS systems —Micros, Aloha, Toast POS, Revel, Shopkeep, and others. It pulls sales data from your POS and depletes the items automatically from your on-hand inventory levels. It also uses the data in its reports.MarketMan’s robust accounting and payment capabilities allow for one-click exporting to your integrated accounting system. Whether you use Quickbooks, Sage, Xero, or Bill.com, we integrate with the most popular accounting solutions so you can seamlessly track credit reminders, manage digital payments, automate expense account categorization, and more.MarketMan’s integration capabilities provide interconnectivity—systems can talk to one another to ultimately build an integrated ecosystem and single source of truth for all the data in your restaurant. It also allows for accessibility, streamlined workflows, time savings, and friction reduction.All in all, MarketMan is the ideal software solution for restaurant owners and food service operators. Schedule a demo to learn more about how MarketMan can work for your restaurant or food service operation.