When evaluating restaurant management tools for your quick service restaurant, there are many aspects to consider. In this page, we provide a breakdown of the importance of inventory management for quick service restaurants, menu management, integral factors to look for in your solution selection process, and an overview of MarketMan as the best choice for your QSR operation.

Why is Inventory Management Integral for Quick Service Restaurants?

When we refer to quick-service restaurant management software, we are primarily looking for a system that has inventory management. This includes tracking, receiving, counting, and analyzing your inventory.

Inventory management is critical for any restaurant operator, especially a quick-service restaurant. Technology can improve speed, accuracy, and efficiency, which is key to QSR operations. Maintaining tight margins is more important for a quick-service restaurant than a full-service restaurant because you need to keep lower plate costs as a percentage of your retail prices.

Compared to full-service restaurants, quick-service restaurants rely heavily on volume and have lower retail prices, which is why it’s integral that you keep your ingredient costs low. If your inventory costs fluctuate, it has an even bigger impact on your bottom line. Therefore, you need to manage your expenses more carefully while maintaining your quality of food.

You also want to get a handle on your inventory levels so that you can make fewer orders per period from your suppliers. This is because there are costs associated with making orders— when you reduce your orders, you save time and lower what you pay for delivery fees.

Therefore, inventory control is critical for quick-service restaurants. A fast-food inventory system or any type of QSR system needs to be efficient and tightly managed. A software solution can help you manage your inventory and procurement faster, lower your food costs, and give you more accurate information about your inventory levels and expenses.

What is Menu Management?

A menu management system allows you to create and adjust recipes, develop menu pricing, offer allergen data, and manage your menu across your enterprise. A unified menu management system enables you to manage your menus and recipes from one central location, while changes update across all your quick service units.

How to Evaluate Quick Service Systems

When you search for the right solution to manage your inventory, menus, and other aspects of your quick service restaurant, there are many factors to consider. Here are just a few benefits and features to look for in your quick service restaurant management software solution:

• Easy to Use: A quick-service environment is busy, with high customer volume and rapid business processes. So it’s very important to have software that is intuitive, easy to use, and can be managed quickly. Plus, you want a solution that is easy for your employees to learn. You don’t want to spend time training your staff on complex software.
  
  
• Layered Levels of Access: You may want to keep certain data private to key personnel, such as your financials or your reports. Therefore, you want to look for software that has custom permissions built-in and layered levels of access for different employees.
  
  
• Multilingual: Oftentimes, your staff may be multilingual, so it would benefit you to have software that can be automatically translated in multiple languages.
  
  
• Mobile App: You want a quick service system that has a mobile app or mobile feature so that you can walk around and take inventory. This saves you time, and you don’t need to have a laptop in the kitchen.

MarketMan: Your Complete Quick Service Restaurant Management Software Solution

MarketMan is one quick-service restaurant management solution that offers full-lifecycle inventory management, menu management, automation, as well as all the items and features listed above.

MarketMan is intuitive and easy to use. MarketMan provides layered levels of access, as employees generally have access to a mobile app while managers have access to a mobile app and website with management-level features. The mobile app allows employees to easily do counting, ordering, and receiving of inventory while walking around the kitchen and storage areas. Finally, MarketMan has multilingual capabilities and can be used in several languages.

Here are some of the other features and benefits that MarketMan offers:

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. It essentially acts as your restaurant stock management software.

Inventory counts can be taken via web or the mobile app. Multiple users can take inventory counts simultaneously, and your on-hand levels are updated throughout the entire system. With inventory counts in MarketMan, you can know inventory quantity and value in real-time, enabling good habits and processes.

You will 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.

Recipe Costing and Menu Management

Marketman provides recipe costing and management. It gives you a complete cost breakdown for each dish on your menu, allowing you to develop recipes and menus that work with your budget.

You can check recipe costs in real-time, identify costly ingredients, receive notifications when menu items become unprofitable, and integrate price tracking. MarketMan automatically calculates your food cost per dish and alerts you when prices of ingredients go above a certain threshold.

With MarketMan, you have a top-to-bottom understanding of what your plate costs are and can determine how to reduce food costs. You can be much more proactive about managing your margins and keeping food costs in line with your targets.

You can calculate and itemize plate costs that drive actionable results, receive valuable insights that provide visibility, and determine menu pricing to reduce waste and food costs.

In addition, MarketMan offers a cookbook for easy and standard recipe management. MarketMan’s cookbook is a central hub that lists all ingredients, portion sizes, cooking instructions, and images for each recipe on your menu. The cookbook organizes recipes in a clear, easy-to-follow way, gives your kitchen all the information they need, and creates consistency your customers can rely on.

Vendor Management and Price Tracking

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

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 also do receiving and reconciliation and AP automation.

Furthermore, Marketman allows you to perform vendor management by tracking 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.

Robust Cost of Goods Sold Reporting

MarketMan contains many robust, real-time business insights and reports that are easy to set up. One of the most relevant reports for quick service restaurants is the COGS and Gross Profits Report.

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 see if 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 margins.

Multi-unit Management with Transfers

If you have more than one location, you can track your data across all locations, and you can transfer inventory between locations easily.

In MarketMan, there’s central production kitchen management for multi-site restaurant businesses. You can unify the connections between your locations and your central production facility. Easily order between locations, keep track of production and deliveries, and allow for simple data tracking at a warehouse level.

This allows for centralization, increased visibility, control, streamlined workflows, and easy scaling of your quick-service restaurant.

Integrations with POS and Accounting Systems

MarketMan integrates with most of the popular quick-service POS systems, as well as offers custom integrations through its API. MarketMan pulls in data from the point of sale system—it uses your menu items and modifiers, then pulls in your net sales per menu item regularly. The sales data flows from your POS to MarketMan on a daily basis. MarketMan makes reports and depletes your inventory from information transferred through your point of sale solution. Once you connect MarketMan with your POS system, you can also do functions such as payment processing.

In addition, 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 also integrates with other technology like online ordering and analytics platforms.

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.

Support and Training

Getting set up with an inventory system can be daunting. MarketMan offers full training and support. Once you decide to implement the system, you will have a dedicated account manager, and access to webinars and live training sessions. You can always reach out to MarketMan Support for help and guidance.

All in all, MarketMan is the ideal solution for your QSR operation. It will help you automate and manage your back-office processes, relieving a lot of headache and hassle in a fast-paced, high-volume environment. When you choose MarketMan, you’ll save time and money, become proactive about managing your costs and operational efficiency, and ensure that your quick service business is set for success.

Schedule a demo today to learn more.