As a business that heavily depends on fresh products, a restaurant must have proper food inventory management to succeed. Keeping track of stock consumption across all the outlets helps you to make informed business decisions on how to run the restaurant for maximum profit. Otherwise, you will have to deal with food shortages, unnecessary food waste and inaccurate forecasting – all of which can greatly hurt your cash flow.

Using retail inventory software like Advstock Inventories small business stocktaking app helps to mitigate these stock inventory management crises. Our barcode inventory system makes monitoring the goods’ stock levels easier, giving you real-time insights into what goes in and out of the restaurant’s inventory.

A stock and inventory app allows you to pinpoint the causes of stock loss – from accidental spills and overproduction to theft and poor portion control – and come up with better strategies to reduce the amount of waste. In other words, proper food inventory management with the right stocktaking apps for food and beverage may solve the bottleneck that prevents your restaurant from achieving monetary success.

Now that your food inventory management has been improved, check out these excellent food inventory management practices for optimising other areas in your restaurant operations.

Raw Material Management

Use the stock and inventory app of your choice to make sure your raw materials are efficiently used. For example, you can set a rule to use older stock first (First In First Out) to reduce spoilage and create a reorder level for each raw product to mitigate stockout. Input each item’s purchase and expiry dates into the inventory management system and use the filter feature to make your work easier.

Integrated Inventory Management

If your restaurant has a bar with an independent inventory, consider integrating it into your system to avoid stock discrepancies. Unlike other inventory tracking systems, Advstock software offers a mix of integrated hardware options (Handheld Scanners, iPhone and Android Apps and Pocket Scanners) that support our self-service cloud-based stocktake software.

Limit Access to Inventory Management System

Your stock inventory data is an important asset for running your business, so you should treat it with extra care. Start by limiting access to your inventory management system to stakeholders only. Contact our team to learn how to modify user access via Advstock’s user-friendly dashboard.

Perform Stocktake Regularly

Monitoring sales and inventory levels every day helps your restaurant to be in a better position to respond to changes in real-time. For instance, if you sold much more of a menu item than expected and are running low on ingredients, you can order them to support demand without having to remove it from your menu.

Advstock self-service stocktake solution allows you to leverage your own resources from anywhere. Simply download the app and use our clip-on phone scanner to turn your mobile device into a barcode scanner. This way, you can perform stocktake as many times as needed cost effectively.