Taking inventory is an unpopular task at most restaurants, but one that is critical to controlling food costs and improving profitability. Yet, when we speak with restaurant owners, many admit that they either do a poor job at it, or do it infrequently. In most cases, the underlying issue is a lack of structure around the inventory-taking process.
With that in mind, here are ten tips to help improve inventory accuracy at your restaurant:
Take inventory frequently. For some items it should be done daily, for others twice a week. At a minimum, it needs to be completed before placing weekly orders.
Take inventory after the restaurant has closed, or before it opens. You cannot take accurate inventory while goods are being sold. Whatever time you pick, stick with it. If you always take inventory on Tuesdays, but sometimes you do it at night and sometimes in the morning, there will be fluctuations in week to week results.
Take inventory before a new shipment arrives and then add the new stock to your counts. Do not attempt to take inventory while deliveries are being made. Items will end up being double-counted.
Clean out and organize your stock areas before taking inventory. Throw out items that have expired, move similar items to the same shelf and in general, tidy up.
Use Inventory Count Sheets. Have one for daily, one for weekly and one for monthly counts (or whatever periods you use) and standardize the items included and the unit (pounds, number of items, boxes etc) each item is tracked in. Changes in what items are tracked can cause large fluctuations in recorded inventory. Use a product like LiveInventory to create these sheets and track results over time.
When taking inventory, make part of the practice ensuring that items are being used on a First In, First Out (FIFO) basis. Older goods should be rotated to the front of shelves so they are used first. Additionally, try to keep the amount of items you have on hand as low as possible to reduce theft and spoilage.
Use two people to take inventory. They should count items separately and then compare results for anomalies. Pairing reduces errors and the temptation to manipulate results or pocket goods.
Use the same staff to take inventory. They will not only get faster at it, but they will tend to be more consistent.
If you use scales to weigh inventory and measure portions, calibrate them weekly.
Standardize what your unit cost is. The price of many items (like ground beef) changes week to week.
Use the latest price paid as the standard. It is the easiest to find and remember.
The most critical piece of the inventory puzzle is consistency. Using the same staff, taking inventory at the same time and counting the same items are some of the easiest ways to improve your accuracy.
Being a manager in a restaurant, or in any hospitality business, is a constant juggling act. From supervising staff to heading business operations, it can be a struggle to keep up. So that ‘s why January’s Hacks Series is all about management tips and tricks. To kick it off, we’re sharing our list of the best apps, online tools, and digital solutions to help streamline your management processes.
Number of reservations by party size and seating arrangement by table size
Cost: Free
The tool from the Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) allows restaurant operators and managers to optimize their reservations and seating by inputting key parameters into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, then using the Solver add-in to view the outputs. The tool’s creator, Gary Thompson, explains that it does so by determining the “best mix of tables in a restaurant, while simultaneously determining which reservations should be accepted from forecasted demand.” The inputs include party size, table size and number, average dining time, and average revenue by party size as well as the degree to which to inflate the amount of time guests will be seated at a table, termed the ‘Round-Up’.
The full description and instructions document depicts the components of the tool and explains how to use the tool by presenting a practical example of table mix optimization for two nights. The tool is provided by CHR free of charge and can be downloaded here.
Maintain an online guestbook to track diner contact info, food preferences, allergies, and more
Available for iPad
Cost: Free trial; $99/month
It should be no surprise that Yelp, an industry leader, has developed a restaurant management tool. SeatMe is an advance management system for your front-of-house needs, allowing you to take online reservations, manage seating, keep track of available tables, and even text waiting patrons when their tables are ready.
Enable ordering on your restaurant website, from you Facebook page, or from within the ChowNow app
Available online or for iOS and Android
Cost: Free Basic Account; Pro Account from $8.99/month
Online ordering goes fancy with ChowNow, a handy app that gives foodies access to your menu via your own website, Facebook page, or the ChowNow mobile app. Allow diners to customize their orders, so your kitchen knows just what to make, and check out online – orders are beamed straight to your restaurant’s main tablet, where employees can check and complete the order, and finally notify patrons when their orders will be ready.
Hundreds of questions cover requirements from the ServSafe Food Protection Manager Certification Examination, the American Food Safety Institute (AFSI) Food Manager Certification (FMC) exam, and the National Registry of Food Safety Professionals (NRFSP) Certified Food Safety Professional examination
Choose study mode or test mode
Available online or for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Palm
Cost: $3.99
The Food Safety Exam Prep app from Upward Mobility offers the most comprehensive food prep information, health requirements, and U.S. safety standards of any mobile app. The test module is perfect for keeping your kitchen current on safety standards, and will help anyone prepare for certification or re-certification.
Built-in extras include a barcode scanner, multiple currency support, database backup and restore, password protection, and auto-default values
Filter by item, category, company, location, supplier/client, payment and shipment
Available for Android
Cost: $5.99
For simple inventory tracking – and streamlined bookkeeping and tax reporting – Inventory Tracker delivers with an easy-to-use solution. The handy app makes it easy to track your restaurant inventory, sales, revenues and balance sheet – daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Create reports and transfer data to spreadsheet format.
Wine pairing, not to mention keeping track of an extensive wine cellar, is one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of the restaurant business, especially without a Sommelier. Enter Uncorkd, an iPad-based wine menu that also keeps track of your wine inventory. Customers can get a comprehensive view of your restaurant’s wine menu including a bottle’s origin, vintage and recommended pairings, while you can easily track inventory.
Publicly accessible business pages that display open jobs
Multi-admin business accounts
Re-usable job listings
Applicant tracking system
Messaging hub
Cost: Free for the moment
Sirvo helps businesses in the hospitality industry hire by connecting employers and job seekers on a platform that simplifies the hiring process, from posting jobs to reviewing applications. With Sirvo, you don’t have to worry about your job listings getting buried under more recent postings because your business page acts as your own hosted careers site. This makes advertising positions easier on you and finding jobs easier on professionals. Plus, you can invite admins to help manage your business page, search and message candidates, and organize applicants using the applicant tracking system.
WorkBright provides businesses that need to onboard new employees rapidly with paperless HR. By reducing the time it takes to collect and process new hire forms and automating the tedious workflows and data entry involved in onboarding new employees, WorkBright virtually eliminates the hiring costs associated with dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Plus, WorkBright ensures that your HR files are compliant, organized, and easily-accessible.
Digital access to staff schedule, from anywhere at anytime
Forecast labor costs with an as-you-schedule dollar tally
Available online from any computer or mobile device
Cost: Free trial; Accounts from $19/month
The purpose of ScheduleFly is to make restaurant staff scheduling easier by simplifying communications between you and your employees. The app turns any mobile device or computer into your communications central: post time schedules, your employees can request shift changes, and you can all coordinate on time off. Best of all, the app makes it easy to avoid costly overtime and forecast labor costs.
Manage your social presence across sites, from one platform
Log on once to schedule posts throughout the day, week or month
Available online or for iOS and Android
Cost: Free Basic Account; Pro Account from $8.99/month
Chances are, your restaurant has gone social and chances are, all that required networking is overwhelming. HootSuite steps in with a simple tool that makes it easy to manage all your social networks, scheduling posts and cross-publishing photos, status updates, and more to multiple social sites. Integrated social profiles include Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages, and others.
Magic resize to automatically create images for all social media platforms (instagram, twitter, google+, etc.)
Cost: Free Basic Account; Canva for Work $119.40/year, $12.95/month
Canva makes designing graphics for social media, presentations, posters, and more exceptionally easy. Included are tons of different layouts to get your design started that are available in pre-set dimensions (for social media) as well as in custom dimensions. Build your designs with Canva’s integrated images, icons and shapes, backgrounds, fonts, and photo filters, many of which are free. Plus, you can upload your own images!
To help businesses produce on-brand marketing materials, Canva recently introduced Canva for Work, which allows teams to collaborate, save brand colors, logos, and fonts, and build their own templates. Also included is automated resizing for various social media images sizes.
Fishbowl is not new and is an industry standard, but we wanted to include it anyway because it should definitely be in you business tool repertoire. With several analytics-based solutions available, Fishbowl focusses on helping restaurants optimize their marketing, strategy, and revenue management. From measuring dining behavior and defining target segments to analyzing and optimizing digital marketing efforts, Fishbowl will help maximize your marketing returns.
Integrating digital solutions and apps in your management practices will not only increase efficiency but also improve your processes and save your business money, so take a few minutes to check out your options! Coming up next are tips on business operations, so be sure to check back in.
The truth is that service is not really a transactional act, and therefore, it can’t be given. Service is a byproduct of consistently executing the other key processes that make a business successful—like hiring right, training well, suggestive selling and practicing servant leadership.
Hospitality or Customer Service?
Most restaurant owners and their customer-facing team members confuse service with hospitality, but they’re different: Service fulfills a need, but hospitality fulfills people. You can get service from an ATM or a vending machine, but you can’t get hospitality. Hospitality is the key deliverable that distinguishes great food service operations from average retail ones.
“Service fulfills a need, but hospitality fulfills people.”
For instance, if you buy a vacuum cleaner at a store—no matter how hard you looked for someone to help you, or how you were treated by the employees—you still have a vacuum cleaner when you get home. So even if there was no discernible service accompanying the purchase, you still have a tangible something after the transaction.
But when you patronize a restaurant, what do you have after you eat? Only memories. While menu, value, décor and cleanliness all play a part, it’s service and hospitality that makes that memory positive and drives customer loyalty and repeat business.
The Core of Great Customer Service
So what are the key drivers of customer satisfaction? Here are the three basics that every industry, not just the food industry, should follow.
1. Focus on ROC, not ROI
Repeat business is the linchpin of profitability in any successful business. Everyone is familiar with ROI, but a lesser-known and more critical metric is ROC—Return of Customer. “Will you come back?” and “Would you tell your friends to try us?” are the two most important questions relative to the customer experience. If the answer is yes to both, you’ve delivered on expectations and achieved ROC. If not, you haven’t. It’s that simple.
2. Hire Great People
Repeat business will always be dependent on the weakest people you allow on your teams. Make your customers’ experience consistently exceptional by hiring and developing great people. When you hire great people—despite the cost, despite the effort, despite the commitment—great things always happen. Compete first for talent, then customers.
When you hire great people—despite the cost, despite the effort, despite the commitment—great things always happen.
3. Consistency Is Key
Know what customers hate about patronizing your business? Inconsistency in quality, service, speed and accuracy. So when customer service problems reoccur in your business—before you blame your people—evaluate the likelihood of a short-circuit in a system or process. Bad service issues routinely arise when you hurry-hire the wrong people, cleanliness isn’t a priority, an understaffed or undertrained team messes up orders, or inefficient scheduling causes you to be short a server at peak hours. This makes customer-facing team members stressed, swamped and snippy, so they smile, serve and ultimately sell less.
Habitually consistent good service is the result of systems that:
Foster a caring culture
Make positivity and fun part of the core business practices
Educate and encourage teams daily to be better than they were yesterday
Don’t forget that excellent service begins with leadership and the notion that, “My customer is anyone who isn’t me.” The fact is that the way you treat your team members determines how they’ll treat your customers. Model the way, every day. Apply constant, gentle pressure every day to improve.
Restaurant operators are stewards of special moments in customers’ lives. The food service industry’s shared goal of giving care and sustenance to strangers and regulars alike as part of our business model is what sets us apart from retail and manufacturers. Service is our invisible product.
Tipping has recently become a topic of much dispute. Over the last few years, a new trend has emerged for compensating service staff: replacing tips with higher hourly wages. While establishments, mainly restaurants, opting for this model believe that this transition will solve a number of issues within the industry, others are not so sure.
So, we’re giving you the facts from both sides of the coin (pun intended) so you can decide for yourself.
Why Tipping Should Be Abolished:
1. Income Inequality.
Tipping creates a wage gap between front of house (servers, bartenders) and back of the house (line cooks, chefs, dishwashers). By tipping your front of house staff, you are only compensating the people who take you order and deliver your food, not those who actually prepare it. If everyone was compensated by hourly pay, there would be less of a discrepancy in pay between the two, making it far fairer.
2. Everywhere else is raising minimum wage and servers are suffering.
The recent increase in national minimum wage standards is offering more money to retail and fast food industries but is not being translated to tipping-based restaurants. Servers are not being compensated equally to the other industries and their average pay is dropping below others.
3. Tipping costs the customer more.
On top of a $100 check, you are ‘obligated’ to add $20 for gratuity. This 20% increase on all food ordered at a restaurant ends up costing the customer more than it should. Some restaurants are compensating for this by increasing menu prices to be allocated to servers and bartenders in place of gratuity. In all, raising menu prices and abolishing gratuity is a fairer allocation of wages and can increase a server’s average pay.
4. Tipping is discriminatory.
Whether we want to admit it or not, we all have our biases. Studies show that people are more likely to tip higher if their server is attractive and/or the opposite gender as the customer. This reality also creates a discrepancy between servers and overall unequal tipping standard.
5. Tipping well excuses sexual harassment.
In the restaurant industry the server is put in an uncomfortable position to be kind and attentive in their guests in order to help boost their tips. This becomes a real issue when people use their money as a means of mistreating servers. Some people believe that if they compensate for their actions with money it rationalizes inappropriate behavior. Servers are then put in an uncomfortable position where they must choose between making good money and being objectified by their customers.
6. Most people don’t understand tipping.
Tipping is an odd mix of obligation and reward. People should want to tip their server or bartender but given the choice, without the social obligation, it seems reasonable to believe that most people wouldn’t do it. The 20% rule is a social standard lost in translation. The fact that tipping is driven by social pressure and not eagerness to repay someone for their attentiveness or entertainment value proves that it should be standardized by a higher hourly pay as opposed to an unwritten rule to live by.
Danny Meyer serves as a great example of the new trend away from tipping. He is at the forefront of this transition. Meyer, owner of Union Square Hospitality Group, recently introduced a no-tipping policy in his restaurants. His argument for doing this was to highlight the kitchen staff and bridge the gap between front and back of the house. By raising menu prices 25%, he aims to offer a fairer wage to his entire staff. Many of his peers commend him on this action, fearing that wait staff and guests will be perturbed by this sudden change. On average, he believes, the wage equality and the gratuity-less prices will increase revenue and appease the restaurant as a whole.
Why We Shouldn’t Abolish Tipping:
As a (biased) server, I have experienced both sides of this issue, having worked at restaurants that use gratuity and those that do not. While there is merit to both sides of the argument, I believe abolishing tipping would ruin the industry.
In most industries, employees are paid based on ability and effort, whether by commission, bonuses, or promotions. So why should the food and beverage industry be any different?
Being a good server or bartender requires extensive training, specialised skills and work ethic. Yes, I know that there are many out there who scoff at this idea, but those people have never run the gauntlet of real service. You must be organized, well-spoken, knowledgeable about menu and drinks, attentive, adaptable…the list goes on and on. As it now stands, the better you are, the more tips you’ll earn. Sure, there will be tables that tip poorly, but it’s a numbers game. More than any other job I’ve worked, the harder you work as a server, the more money you’re going to make, and it’s because of tipping.
Another important element to consider is incentive. It’s not a mystery that your server is kind to you because it’ll make them more money. If this merit-based compensation is stripped, the only incentive to provide quality service becomes not getting fired. It makes it easier for service employees to do just what’s necessary. Going above and beyond has no meaning if there is no reason to do it. It’s a cruel reality, but that’s how it is. No one wants to be bending over backwards for needy guests at 9:00 am on a Sunday morning if they don’t have to. The incentive of making more money for more effort will always trump mediocrity for a higher hourly pay.
The negative impacts of no tipping go beyond the customers, and in fact, cause the entire establishment to suffer. Not only will businesses lose revenue because of lost customers, but also from the lack of upselling. Since servers’ compensation is not based on the check total, there’s just no incentive (there’s that word again). If businesses can’t maintain a steady cash flow, then they can’t afford to pay servers. It’s a vicious cycle that isn’t being taken into account.
What About A Compromise?
This is definitely a complicated issue with pros and cons to both sides. Perhaps there is a place for both models: tipping and increased hourly pay.
When it comes to the dining experience in itself, if your server is good at their job, they will enhance the entire meal with suggestions, entertainment and attentiveness. For example, when it comes to a fine-dining establishment, your server is crucial to the success of your meal and should be compensated accordingly.
At a diner or any turn-and-burn establishment, it makes sense to pay employees with an hourly wage. The varieties of restaurants call for different forms of compensation and this must be taken into account.
Keeping service industry employees engaged and committed to their roles can decrease turnover, increase profits and positively affect customer satisfaction. When employees feel like they’re a part of a team, they are more likely to take pride in their work and display interest in aligning with company goals. Here are four ways to jumpstart your efforts:
Simplify employee scheduling. Creating work-life balance can be challenging. Employees appreciate the opportunity to provide shift preferences and availability. Although you might not be able to grant all requests, exercise understanding. To centralize and provide structure for this process, think about updating your tech to automate scheduling from both your end and your employees’. Those programs allow for streamlined communication among managers and employees, as well as other administrative benefits.
Assign roles and positions. Service-related businesses offer many different types of jobs. Establishing scope for roles and providing ongoing cross-training shows employees you value their contributions and want to see them advance.
Encourage growth. Many employees strive to move up the industry ladder. When managers promote from within, they design a rewarding, positive atmosphere to which employees gravitate.
Seek feedback. Ask employees to share compelling customer responses. When management institutes an open-door communication standard, employees feel more comfortable relaying positive and negative guest comments, as well as their own observations. When you receive enough feedback to identify trends, thank the employees that helped you get to that point.
