Basic Inventory Control - FAQs

Overview:

For a restaurant, inventory control involves tracking and monitoring the items that you purchase to produce the menu items that you sell. If you have a restaurant and bar, then the inventory items to control are typically Food, Liquor, Beer, Wine, and Non-Alcoholic Beverages.

Restaurant inventory control can be as basic (and easy) as tracking your purchases, periodically counting your inventory on hand, monitoring your inventory usage, and evaluating your cost of goods sold (COGS). The only effort required for what we refer to as "Basic Inventory Control" is scanning invoices and entering periodic inventory counts.

COGS-Well can take you well beyond basic inventory control with added features for ordering, transfers, recipe management, menu analytics, waste tracking, production, and variance control.

The above said, we recommend getting started with basic inventory control because basic inventory control will provide most restaurant operators with fast, relatively easy, and significant benefits.

Why Perform Inventory Control:

Inventory control reduces costs, saves time, and provides new insights. Studies report that restaurant operators can reduce their cost of goods sold as a percentage of sales by 2% or more with just basic inventory control. Some of the reasons are listed below:

Reduce Costs:

• Purchasing Management:
  • Better manage who you buy from, when, what items, and what quantities.
  • Reduce or over or under-stocking and minimize waste.
• Control Inventory:
  • When your team knows you are controlling inventory, then purchasing, over-portioning, and waste, will often improve.
  • Inventory control is also an excellent deterrent to theft.
• Get Credit for Prepared Items: If you prepare recipe items in large batches or at a significant cost, you can count them in inventory and receive credit against your cost of sales for items in stock.

Save Time:

A lot of the features in basic inventory control are designed to save time by automating processes that are otherwise done manually. Some examples are below:

• Scan Invoices: Scan invoices to avoid manually entering them into inventory control or accounts payable systems.
• Avoid Spreadsheets: There is no reason to maintain or update spreadsheets. COGS-Well will always reflect the items you are buying, the vendors you are buying from, and the most current item costs.
• Make Counting Inventory Easier/Faster:
  • You can count items in partial packs in addition to full packs.
  • You can count and record the counts concurrently on a tablet device.
  • You can count items by storage location in shelf-to-sheet order.
  • You can easily flag out-of-stock items not to appear until/unless purchased again.
• Manage Transfers: Automating the process of requesting and fulfilling transfers between locations (or from a commissary) will save your managers significant time and improve accuracy.
• Accounting System Updates: Ending Inventory and transfer adjustments are reported in debit and credit journals and the adjustments can be exported directly to a General Ledger.

Provide New Insights:

COGS-Well has quite a few features and reports within basic inventory control that are designed to provide you with new or added insights into your inventory. Some examples are below:

• Cost Alerts: Cost Alerts will notify you when an inventory item cost changes by a trigger percentage.
• Cost Trends: Cost trends reporting will show you cost changes over any date range, for inventory items.
• Recipe Costs: You can create recipes for menu items and the cost and profit for each item will always be up to date. You can model prices or use a target cost percentage to suggest pricing.

Summary:

In conclusion, basic restaurant inventory control will help you reduce costs, save time, and increase insights. You can get started doing basic inventory control immediately after your Initial System Setup is complete and we provide you with your login credentials.