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Using your restaurant POS system to control inventory
A good way to make more profits and successfully run your restaurant is by managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and supplies. With these, probably the most difficult cost to control is food.
Simultaneously monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order efficiently must be done in order to manage food costs effectively.
An inventory software will help you identify accurately when your food costs are out of line. With an inventory software, typically you'll save 1% - 2% of sales, and could save you much more. And it is savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.
With a POS-based inventory control system, operators will easily spot and solve food cost difficulties obvious by just simply focusing on portion control. And when your employees know that the system is carefully keeping track, it stop waste as well as theft.
When experiencing food cost problems, a restaurant owner will mostly learn this lesson after a week of using inventory control software.
Inside his restaurant, he would be portion controlling, yield testing and performing physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he uses an inventory software where he realizes his inventory was out by exactly 20 pounds of lamb each week; coincidentally, it's precisely the same weight as a box. Upon knowing, it was relatively that easy to specify where the problem originated: one of the prep cooks was helping himself to a box of goodies every Friday night.
Improving your bottom line
The inventory control program, in a typical restaurant point of sale, the operator simply starts by entering their recipes and product costs to the system. The system then tracks the restaurant's ideal usage according on those recipes and actual sales.
The software also can track product usage in situations where some orders don’t conform to a standard recipe. The operator can then do a physical inventory and generate reports in order to compare it with the calculated ideal usage to be able to spot their differences. The software can be set up to track as many items as the operator wants.
For most restaurants, their top 10 items 80% of their food cost problem. Key items are scheduled in nightly, weekly or even monthly counts of some other items.
Even an ounce of over-portioning 1 item per order can mean hundreds of dollars in a month for restaurants. If you eliminate over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days on a $1.67 per pound of a single item, can add up to more than $300.00 in savings or $3600.00 in one year!
Keeping a better track and control also helps an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand, reducing waste and freeing up cash for other things. Losses due to carrying too much excess inventory can add up to a loss of between 2% and 5 % 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 after helping them program their system properly, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – all of which went to their bottom-line profits.
So if you're using a restaurant POS system or are considering a purchase make sure you know how to and understand the additional profits that you can reap by learning and properly using the inventory module of the system.
The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits..
Visit POS-Fof-Restaurants.com for more information on how our national network of restaurant point of sale professionals can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times.
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