Inventory - The 24/7 Camera · Restaurant Pros

Inventory - The 24/7 Camera

The top tier of Critical Success Factors in restaurants and bars is inventory. If you're too busy to track your food and liquor, stop something you're doing, cancel something. Make time. In my consulting era, I kept seeing the same dilemma. An owner calls me in to help him find where they are losing money, and it was always the same; no P+L, no inventory. The first steps on setting up a business or turning it around are those two do-or-die tasks.

Inventories need to set up to complement your POS system. You are counting portions of fish, steak, Patron Silver, Bud Light, et al.

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I can help you create a spreadsheet that breaks down the bottles to portion sizes and pounds of meat to ounces so you can discern exactly how many portions you used, and square them with your actual portions sold.

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Ways to measure. While the method of eyeballing a bottle to determine to the tenth or to .05 of the bottle is effective, I prefer the old liquor scale. With that, we tracked things like a bartender who was pouring 2 house margaritas with Don Julio Anejo for her friend instead of well Tequila. While it may seem exhausting to weigh all your bottles, keep in mind, you can mark the level of the slow moving bottles with a Sharpie pen to free yourself from counting the Green Chartreuse every week. Since you've copied and pasted the last inventory in the new spreadsheet, you just leave those bottle counts the same. If you have 100+ brands, one third to a half of them won't be poured in any given week.

Food is trickier, and we always focus on auditing the proteins. I have spreadsheets to get you started on any of those, if you wish.

I still am a huge camera fan, as I had 29 cameras filming every corner of my restaurant when I sold it. They catch the actual theft in action; over-pouring at the bar, the dishwasher hiding a bag of beef in the garbage can - cameras can help cancel all those tricks...if they know you're watching the cameras. I'll cover the many uses of cameras for restaurants in one of the next posts. But inventory is perpetual. And you must know what you are buying every week is getting sold.

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