Six Ways to Keep your Restaurant from Eating All Your Profits

Waste can take a big bite out of any restaurant's profit. That's why food and beverage cost control is vital, no matter how well the business is doing in terms of clientele and volume.

Keeping track of everything takes time, especially if you've been relying on the old fashioned spreadsheet or a clipboard -- and when you're running a restaurant, time is in short supply. These days, good restaurant management software that can aid in a variety of tracking, including food and beverage cost control formulas, is a necessity.

Restaurant software that delivers food and beverage cost control can help in a variety of ways that a spreadsheet cannot.

Full  Integration

Worried that new software might not be compatible with what you're using now? A good program will be compatible with many systems.

Programs designed specifically for restaurants can integrate some of those processes and update information across a range of tasks without multiple entries. You'll be able to spot and fix problem areas more easily, too.

Planning

Food service experts will tell you that planning and documenting plating instructions, ordering and receiving procedures, prep work necessities, and serving standards can help cut your food cost dramatically. Menu planning software helps make it easy to scale recipes, control your inventory, automatically calculate ingredient requirements, and create cost and volume projections.

You'll find that the reduction in duplicated tasks for menu planning frees you from being bogged down in paperwork.

Inventory

Food service software applications designed specifically for restaurants, catering and hospitality businesses, food service management and institutional feeding businesses can cut costs exponentially. Features such as creating an audit trail for your accounting team, keeping inventory updated, tracking deliveries, are all right at your fingertips.

You'll also be able to set benchmarks to show progress toward your goals, and best of all, you will be able to reduce costs through better tracking, waste reduction and more efficient ordering.

Costing

Sticking with a prime vendor might help you with food cost control, but not all restaurant owners have that luxury. With the right integrated food service management software, you can compare prices from various vendors to get the best deals while you plan meals or track your inventory. That makes cost and volume projections a snap, especially if you need to scale up a recipe on short notice for a special event.

Just think -- no more worrying about whether you're charging the right amount. With the right software to do the calculations for you quickly and easily, you can order that extra sauce with confidence.

Reports

If your restaurant seems to be attracting the right volume of customers, but swallowing profits whole, food and beverage cost control reports can lead you straight to the source of the loss.

Progress Monitoring

Once you've identified a problem area and instituted changes, food costing software keeps track of how well the changes are working. Features like cost-to-profit ratios and customized worksheets that break down your procedures step by step, remove the guesswork.

The right food and beverage cost control formulas will help you minimize unnecessary losses, and it can reduce the time you spend searching for the cause of lost profits.  Look for food and beverage cost control software that offers integration with your existing data & accounting systems, your stockroom devices, and your POS software, and you'll find your profits -- and quite possibly your free time -- will move in the right direction.

FOOD service software |food-costing software by FoodCo

We help you find Lost Profit | save Money |MAXIMIZe PROFITS

 www.foodcosoftware.com | @FoodcoSoftware

Four reasons why you shouldn’t be using a spreadsheet to Manage your Restaurant

There was a time that the humble spreadsheet was the go-to tool for handling the large amounts of data associated with running a restaurant. However, as technology changes, new and more efficient methods of handling that data have emerged, including integrated systems that can deal with this data in a more secure and effective manner.

But using a spreadsheet is not simply outdated, it can even be dangerous for your business! Here are four reasons why you shouldn’t be using a spreadsheet to manage your restaurant.

They are useless for tracking changeable quantities

Before we get too negative, it is worth pointing out that spreadsheets are actually pretty good at doing what they are designed to do, which is tracking fixed and discrete parcels of data over time. 

What they are not good at, however, is tracking changeable quantities, and this is where their service falls apart. If you run a restaurant business, you’re going to have plenty of changeable quantities, such as wholesaler ingredient prices and stock volumes. It takes a lot of manual work to keep track of these quantities and to keep your spreadsheet up to date, and you should count yourself lucky if no errors slip through the net!

An integrated system that tracks your suppliers’ prices and updates your records accordingly will eliminate this risk. 

They are prone to data corruption 

Data corruption in a spreadsheet is like the Alien in the movie with Sigourney Weaver; it is difficult to track, difficult to identify (until it's too late) and can cause untold damage. Data corruption occurs when the wrong information is logged into the system. This information is then fed through calculation after calculation until it has spread like a virus and corrupted all of your data.

Corrupted data leads to a reduction in profit, which can do tremendous harm to your business if left unchecked. The key to avoiding such a catastrophe is not to use a spreadsheet at all, instead opting for a system which is less vulnerable and can analyze discrepancies quickly and effectively, rooting out the cause of the corruption automatically.

It can take ages to correct an error 

Restaurant businesses need to handle vast amounts of data. Inputting and then maintaining this data in a spreadsheet is a cumbersome and unwieldy process and can make identifying mistakes or discrepancies in the data difficult. It might be hours or even days before you realize something is up with your spreadsheet, by which time a great deal of costly damage has already been done.

Unless you plan to employ a team of people to scour your spreadsheet on a daily basis, checking and re-checking for errors, it is very difficult to root out potentially harmful discrepancies. If the wrong quantity is added or the data is corrupted, this error becomes buried in the spreadsheet when the next set of data is added, and then concealed again by the next set and so on. It is still there, messing up your calculations, but it is difficult to find and put right.

Integrated data handling systems make it far easier to find errors in inputted data, and can correct these errors in no time.

They are inefficient 

Maintaining a spreadsheet is labor-intensive and requires direct human input to record data. This in itself is an inefficient process, and ties up a member, or members, of your staff that could be working on other, more useful tasks.

The amount of labor increases when you’re trying to find and rectify a problem with your data. Your team will need to waste valuable working hours scouring the data and trying to salvage as much as possible, and the whole process will become an exercise in damage limitation.

In order to boost efficiency and maximize profits, restaurant businesses need to move away from traditional spreadsheets. Integrated systems analyze and handle data more effectively, updating automatically and freeing up extra working hours that can be spent on other areas of your business. 


Additional information: Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

FOOD service software |food-costing software by FoodCo

We help you find Lost Profit | save Money |MAXIMIZe PROFITS

 www.foodcosoftware.com | @FoodcoSoftware