Making Your Inventory Work For You: How To Order Just Enough
When you’re concerned about making a profit at your restaurant, it isn’t about the people that walk through the front door or the number of desserts that you sell. It’s all about maintaining a reasonable inventory and keeping your regular ordering under control.
But how do you do that?
The best way to begin to regulate your inventory is to figure out how much stock you are using on an average week. Though you’ll be ordering more for holidays and other special occasions, you job right now is to determine the status quo for your restaurant. This is a great time to start a system of keeping track of the items in your backroom, coolers, and freezers.
You might want to create a spreadsheet of the things that you have as well as the things that you use every day. Having inventory taken at the end or beginning of each day is the best way to start getting control. Find out what your restaurant is using and what is sitting on the back shelves.
And this isn’t just important for profits either; it’s also a matter of customer safety. The longer food sits in the back of your restaurant, the less safe it becomes for human consumption not to mention the fact that the quality diminished the closer you get to the expiration date.
Be picky when it comes to this inventory list. You want to know when things are being thrown out as well as any stock that isn’t fresh when it comes in. You have to know where you are in order to get to the next step.
A lot of restaurant managers are concerned about the fact that they might not order enough for the week and inevitably end up ordering too much. Is there a secret formula? Unfortunately no, but with the knowledge of your inventory, you can begin to see trends in the overall usage and begin to make better decisions.
What you may want to begin is having a low point as which your inventory must be and can not fall under. This is the bare minimum that you have to have in stock at all times. While you can go over this amount, you will want to realize that the bare minimum is good enough for the ordering time period that you have.
And that brings to mind another facet in ordering and your inventory; how often are you ordering? While you don’t want to run out of anything, that’s actually the best way to increase your overall profits without have to bring in more customers. Think about the bare essentials that you think you need for the time period and then place orders that reflect that.
This is truly a trial and errors process, granted, but over time, you’ll be able to have less and less in the back, saving you from wasting good product as well as spending on things that you don’t necessarily need.
Start today by finding out what you have in the back, so that you can make more money in the front.
|
