How Can I Increase My Bottom Line Profits?

Sept. 4, 2009 - PRLog -- A good way to make more profits and run your restaurant to success is by managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and supplies. Of those, plausibly the toughest cost to control is food.

Simultaneously monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order efficiently must be done in order to manage food costs effectively.

An inventory software will help you identify specifically when your food costs are out of line. With an inventory software, you'll typically save 1% - 2% of sales, and can save even more. And it is savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.

A POS-based inventory control system, operators may well easily spot and solve food cost problems visible by just simply focusing on portion control. When employees know that the system is keeping track, it discourages both waste and theft.

When experiencing food cost problems, a restaurant owner will mostly learn this lesson after a week of using inventory control software.

Inside his restaurant, he would be portion controlling, yield testing and doing a physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he began using inventory software that he began to realize his inventory was out by exactly 2 pounds of blue marlin every week; coincidentally, the exact weight of a box. Knowing that, it was relatively easy to identify the source of the problem: a prep cook was stashing a box of goodies every every Saturday evening.

Your bottom line

In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory control program, the operator sets up the software by first entering their recipes and product costs. The system then tracks the ideal usage based on those recipes and the restaurant’s actual sales.

The inventory control software can aslo track product usage in situations where some orders is not in line with the standard recipe. The operator then can do a physical inventory and generate reports comparing that inventory with the calculated ideal usage in order to site variances. The operator can also set the software to track any quantity of items he wants.

In a majority of restaurants, their top 10 items 80% of their food cost problem. And you can schedule nightly counts of key items and weekly or even monthly counts of some other items.

With a single item alone, over-portioning by 1 ounce per order can cost a restaurant hundreds of dollars a month. If an item is running $1.67 per pound, eliminating over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days could add up to more than $300.00 in savings or $3600.00 per year!

Better tracking and controls also can help an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand, reducing waste and freeing up cash for other things. If the operator carries too much inventory could cause a loss of between 2% and 5 % on an operator's average profit-and-loss statement.

According to one of our clients it was a lot of effort to set up because they have a fairly extensive menu, but once we helped them program properly, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – all of which went to their bottom-line profits.

So if you already have a restaurant POS system or are planning a purchase make sure you know how to and understand the additional profits that you can acquire by learning and properly using the inventory module of the system.

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The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20  years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits..

Visit http://www.pos-for-restaurants.com for more information on how our national network of restaurant point of sale professionals can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times.

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