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How to Manage Your Restaurant Bar Inventory

Getting a great deal on your Restaurant Bar Inventory only means something if you are able to turn your whole product around and sell it at a bigger value to your customers. Effective inventory management, portion direction, and theft resistance are three keys to ensuring that the rule is successful, and keep your bar running with its head up water.

Ordering and Tracking Restaurant Bar Inventory

There isn’t a significant discrepancy between the type of inventory tracking you do as a manager for your menu items as the tracking you do for liquor. Twice the distributors. Twice the paperwork. And twice the responsibility. Training your shift managers on inventory control and order is essential to keeping your bar well-stocked and profitable.

Claiming the use of purchase orders on every invoice of beverages makes tracking method easier, both per shift and over time. It’s also another way to help ensure all your establishment’s purchases are accounted for and authorized.

Really like your food ingredients, liquor should have a special person usually a manager chosen to accept controls and check the original property delivered against the purchase order to confirm the match. Inventory should then also be traced electronically, both in single spreadsheet format or in a more advanced software designed for liquor inventory control.

It’s important is to ascertain what level should do, both for your overall property and for your bar. Bartenders should never have to go to the stockroom in the middle of a shift it leaves customers serving accidentally and opens up the opportunity for both crime and inadvertent recess forming on inventory tracking.

But by the same sign, running out of an item relevant to your bar’s many popular brand beverages is not an acceptable option either, and will assuredly tease more than a few customers.

Serving and Portion Control

Just as with plating in the kitchen, helping control when accepting liquor from your restaurant bar is important for maintaining the profitability of your menu. When your profit is limited by the number of pours scheduled per bottle, even a seemingly minuscule quarter ounce, over-poured or under-poured, affects your business.

When serving liquor, whether in mixed beverages or shots, it’s important to go through the same rigorous training one might prevent over-pouring wine. One resolution, of direction, is to require your bartenders use pre-measured jiggers rather of free pouring, but the actuality is, this resolution could initiate your session back in performance while keeping precision, which could hurt profitability if your bartenders get backed up. Every pour is then doubled, from the bottle to the jigger and from the jigger to the glass, resulting in half as many beverages at the same time.

The trick, of course, is making sure every one of your bartenders are counting at precisely the same speed, and stopping the flow of alcohol at precisely the right moment.

No matter what style of pour you train your bartenders to use, one very important step to emphasize is ringing every beverage up before it’s prepared or served. Making sure every order is recorded in your POS system not only protects your staff from absent-mindedness and you from inadvertent profit loss, but it can also help prevent deliberate theft as well.

Preventing Theft of Restaurant Bar Inventory

The reality is, alcohol particularly those high profits, top shelf items is more subject to theft than almost any other item in your restaurant. It’s very easy for a bartender to double stream for their colleagues without anyone reaching on.

And since over half of all bars only take inventory once a month, there’s plenty of opportunities and not much ability to track precisely when an item goes missing.

One way to compare sales and your accurately-recorded restaurant bar inventory volume is to maintain a separate trash container (or another clearly defined area) for empty bottles apart from the rest of your restaurant’s decline a container only one authorized shift administrator can dispose of. That count can then be related to the early shift or day’s inventory totals and resolved against total receipts for each item in your POS system. If there’s more than a slight variance, you may have to investigate further.

Your employees should have a place in the back of the house specifically designated for them to put their clothes and bags during shift hours.

 

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