Inventory Management

Tracking your inventory is one of the best ways to manage the day-to-day operations of your restaurant/café.  By taking a monthly count, you can manage:

  • Food Costs
  • Waste and Potential Theft
  • Turnover

At a very high level, you can track how much you spend on food relative to your revenue.  Most restaurants will set a benchmark of 20% -40%.  If your food cost goes up drastically, the cause is one of three things:

  • You are not portioning your food properly or too much is being thrown away
  • You have a problem with theft
  • Your costs have increased, but you haven’t raised your prices to reflect that change

On a more micro level, you can the cost out individual recipes.  By knowing the cost of a dozen eggs, a pound of butter and a pound of cheese, for example, you know how much a single egg, ounce of cheese and butter cost… and you can then decide how much to charge for a plate of scrambled eggs.

You can also keep track of inventory that needs to be moved quickly or may have been forgotten about.

The process of food costing was tremendously helpful. Knowing all the costs, we can make the right decisions and charge the right amount for our products.  I feel so much better at the end of the day.” Natalie McEachern, Glutenus Minimus

 

How to Track Inventory:

Create a spreadsheet and list each item that you carry.  List the unit price and total on hand.  Each month, count how many units you have on hand.  If you want to be fancy, you can also convert the case price into the portion size so that you can efficiently cost out your recipes.

You can also download our template.  With this template you will be able to:

  • Easily track the value of your inventory
  • Track the portion cost of each ingredient
  • Track the food cost of individual recipes

Need a little more support in using this template? We now offer an hour of individual consultation.

To learn more about inventory management, read our article here: https://www.juliashanks.com/inventory-management/

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