As a restaurant, failing to anticipate a shortage of key ingredients can be costly in terms of profits, and embarrassing to your reputation. In an industry in which word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews matter, both positive and negative diner experiences can spread like wildfire, directly affecting your footfall. Diners tend to offer loyalty to their favourite restaurant, too; a memorable experience encourages customers to return time after time. Diners can also be fastidious, with unavailable items on the menu a major cause of dissatisfaction.
Restaurant inventory management software can ensure your food stock is effectively managed, so you don’t run short of key ingredients or dishes unexpectedly, and also that you aren’t storing excess quantities of food that will perish prematurely.
Managing Your Stock With Inventory Management Software
Managing your food stock is vital for productivity. Unlike other goods, food is time-limited due to necessary use-by dates, meaning that excess stock is certain to dent your profits if it must be discarded. If customers’ menu choices are in any way unpredictable, this can mean a surge in demand on a limited number of products which, without unlimited stores, could lead to low availability.
Food inventory management and software is straightforward to use without consuming large amounts of time and can help to build up a pattern of your customers’ dining behaviour. This plays a major role in understanding which products will be most heavily in demand.
Regular System Updates
Accurate stock management depends on keeping your records up to date. Manually trying to manage a large stock of items is time-consuming and liable to errors, increasing the chance of carrying excess items or running short of others. With stock management software, you can simply update quantities every time stock is delivered, ensuring that accurate stock levels are maintained.
Real-Time Reports
To ensure that diners have a full choice of your dishes, it’s important you can generate real-time stock level reports whenever required. Inventory management software calculates the optimum inventory for each menu item, so you can model the inventory against key performance indicators, such as table covers or target service levels. From this information, you’ll also be able to decide how much to invest in stock levels to ensure customer demand is met, without accumulating a costly surplus.
What Next?
Our Reflex Planning inventory management software can optimise your food stock to improve efficiency, reduce costs and overhaul your customer service. For more information, please get in touch, or [click here] to arrange a free demonstration.
