Significance of Inventory Management Software in Food and Beverage Industry

Inventory consists of all the items or raw materials required to prepare dishes in the restaurant, and inventory management system helps you track each ingredient used in the dish. Inventory managementsystems integrated with the restaurant POS allows you to control and organize each and every aspect of the stock, maintains a smooth flow of supply and also helps you boost your overall profit. As the volume of business grows in a restaurant, inventory management becomes a important part of restaurant operations.

Features:

• Daily stock consumption report generated
• Provides up to date reports of item (available, not available, over stock, under stock)
• Track of material demand, re-order level and closing stock of F&B
• Tracks moving stock items inward / outward, material wastage, procurement and expiry dates
• Track of material consumption and its automatic updation into inventory
• Recipe management in Point- Of-Sale software is a very helpful tool in our system which track material as well as items that are over in the kitchen

Here are the essentials of inventory management that you should practice

Monitoring the stock:

You must always remember to organize your existing stock before bringing in a fresh stock. Asimot POS inventory management software gives you the available stock count at the beginning of the day, and the stock closing at the end of the day. It calculates the balance stock automatically, and tallies it with the available physical stock.

Raw material management:

Managing the inventory smartly is essential to avoid wastage. Use these points to make sure that your stock is efficiently used.

• Try to adopt minimal stocking approach for your restaurant inventory, especially in case of the perishables.

• Try to use seasonal products. With smart menu engineering, you can use them for a season’s special. This way, you’ll be able to attract customers with something new, and also avoid wastage of perishables.

• Asimot POS prompts you to reorder when you run out of supplies. You can set a re-order level for each of your items. As soon as the ingredient reaches that level, a reminder mail will be sent to you to re-order that ingredient in advance. This prevents the embarrassing situation of running out of supplies during operation hours. This is especially helpful in case of popular items and perishable items that need to be restocked frequently. Also, ordering only when required helps avoid wastage.

• Make sure that items are being used on a First in First out (FIFO) basis. That is, use the older stock first. Only when the previous stock has been used up, use the newly purchased items to prevent wastage.

Recipe management and costing:

Standardization and management of recipe is essential for proper inventory management as it helps in curbing food costs. In a standard recipe, the quantity for each ingredient to be used is specified; therefore the inventory management system can easily judge the number of days the remaining stock will last. Random use of ingredients leads to an imbalance in the stock and causes the stock to dry up before time.

You can also get an estimate of how much preparing a dish would cost you by the help of recipe costing feature. You just have to feed in the recipe along with the portion of each ingredient, and the inventory management system gives you the food cost for that dish. This further helps you decide the selling price of that product. Ideally, the food cost should be 30% of the menu price or selling price.

Reporting and analytics

Reporting and analytic is another important feature of inventory management that helps in restaurant operations. The sales reports and the raw material usage helps forecast and create future plans. Profit and loss reports are generated depending on the stock sale and consumption. This feature further helps you to-

• Analyze inventory trends– You can analyze the inventory trends to make informed decisions such as deciding the menu. Detailed reports based on the consumption of each stock gives insights on which ingredient is the most popular, and needs to be utilized more in the recipes.

• Keep a track of stock and maintain accuracy– An accurate list of the available supplies helps you keep track of the daily and weekly usage