Centralize Restaurant Management with Food and Beverage Inventory Software

Inventory is the foundation of your restaurant. Your food and beverage inventory strategy keeps everything connected and organized—and one small mistake can result in a massive financial and operational change for your business.

Restaurants fail primarily due to mishandled costs, and managing your revenue begins with inventory control. While inventory management isn't the most exciting part of running a restaurant, it's a vital part of operating a sustainable and profitable venture, and luckily, it's easier to track with the right technology.

MarketMan provides real-time dashboards so you can view your inventory count and levels at all times. It also keeps track of which food or beverage items are least profitable, reaching low levels, or are going to waste. Those kinds of essential data points are exactly what your restaurant needs to be financially sustainable.

Cut Down on Food Waste and Lost Revenue

Restaurant management software helps you locate which food items are potentially going to waste. In some restaurants, up to 10% of food is wasted before reaching the customer – meaning you may not receive 10% of your revenue under your existing inventory system.

It's one thing to notice that your recent shipment of chicken decreased quickly, but it's another thing to know exactly why. Was it part of a popular menu item and served to satisfied customers? If so, great! You should be able to attribute every ounce of the chicken to a price point. However, if that was not the case, you could take into account these areas of loss:

• Staff mistakes
• Spillage
• Staff meals
• Theft
• Food that has been sent back due to customer complaints

All of these areas lead to a loss for both inventory and profit for your restaurant. Mistakes happen, and not every ounce of food makes it onto a customer's table, but precisely knowing what supplies have been wasted for any reason is essential.

Software solutions like MarketMan can help you receive insights into where you're creating waste in your restaurant. You'll receive reports on inventory that goes out, such as menu items and ingredients sold and waste produced. This technology keeps you up to date on daily waste production, so you can create actionable strategies to reduce it.

Automate Your Inventory Processes with Food and Beverage Inventory Software

No more tedious spreadsheets! Implement restaurant management software to track your inventory. This tool is essential for streamlining your restaurant's operations and maximizing profitability. Here are just a few ways digitizing your sitting inventory management can help:

Food Inventory

• Create automated processes: When food deliveries come in, your staff can pull out a tablet with the inventory management software installed to record the units and check the order against the system. This system cuts down on human error (for example, the vendor only provides you five orders of an ingredient when you ordered ten) and ensures you don't overpay for items.
  
• Set inventory alerts: Never run out of an ingredient during a busy service again. With inventory management software, you can set alerts when you're running low on an ingredient so you can order it before it's gone.
  
• Automate ordering: Another excellent feature of inventory management software is built-in purchasing and order management. You don't have to lift a finger to order ingredients that you're running low on. Instead, you can set an automation rule to order an ingredient when you hit your par level. That way, your suppliers receive your order instantly, and you can rest assured knowing that a new delivery is on its way. Not only does this save you time from having to place orders manually, but it also eliminates problems that can come from handwritten orders (is that a 4 or 7?)
  
• Manage your vendor relationships: You can also establish delivery times and days in the system so your vendors don't try to deliver on the day your restaurant is closed. You can pay your invoices digitally and get notifications if there's an irregularity in your billing.

Beverage Inventory

• Automate ongoing inventory tracking: To conduct an inventory, you need to count every ingredient, input, or supply, and the amounts and record it. At a bar, measuring amounts is crucial in ensuring efficiency, especially with liquor. Food and beverage inventory software can help you take more accurate counts.
  
• Track inventory as beverages are sold: These software solutions typically integrate with your Point of Sale (POS) system so that when a bartender enters an order, the standardized amount is subtracted from your inventory. So when your bar does a shot and a beer combo for a dozen folks watching the Sunday afternoon games, each shot is recorded at the POS.
  
• Improve your bar’s efficiency: You can keep track of inventory movement in real-time, giving you ample time to contact suppliers, manage waste, and adjust prices for an anticipated rush, like on a Saturday night.

Automate Food and Beverage Price Calculations, Too!

Manually calculating food and beverage costs will hurt your restaurant for a few reasons. To start, manually handling this process leads to human error. Consider this—while your hands are full managing your employees, cleaning up spills, and dealing with orders, there's a high chance that you'll enter a number or two incorrectly, which can negatively influence a critical business decision like removing a menu item. Technology can help make judgment calls on accurate data rather than gut feeling.

There are many other ways you can use food and beverage software to streamline your restaurant management:

• Use it for recipe costing: It's easy to use your inventory management platform to calculate recipe costs because the software calculates the cost per ingredient. This process helps you set menu prices. If an ingredient rises in price, you can decide whether you want to raise the menu price for that dish, charge extra for the add-on (like avocado), or find a replacement ingredient.
  
• Make taking inventory a one-step process: Manually calculating food cost happens entirely outside of the inventory process (which you may also be done manually). But today's inventory management software lets you do it all in one place.
  
• Predict price changes and seasonal fluctuations automatically: Your suppliers are changing your ingredient prices daily, and it's nearly impossible to keep track of every price change. Certain ingredients are significantly more expensive when they're not in season or if there's a rare national shortage. When prices change, it's integral to quickly find a similar and comparably priced replacement ingredient or charge more for it.
  
• Get real-time cost alerts: If you don't happen to notice that a supplier is now charging you 5% more for an ingredient, you won't know to update your food cost. Instead of being reactive, you can be proactive with a recipe costing software like MarketMan. Our software will alert you when your ingredient prices change and automatically recalculate the dish's cost dynamically, so you have access to the most accurate data available.

Unifying your restaurant management processes is not only more financially savvy—it's simpler for you as an owner, bar manager, GM, or accountant. Real-time analytics, innovative integrations with your POS system, and higher levels of inventory accuracy can help lead you on a path to restaurant success.

Ready to build a more profitable restaurant? Sign up for a free demo today.