@ColeThripp, happy to help. I run cafés on Square and moved from paper to digital inventory.
Q1. Main factors when converting. Three things. How much of my catalog has to be clean before the system is worth anything, because inventory is only as good as the item list under it. How much time my staff will spend keeping it current. Inventory only matters when you can match it up with costs, and some sort of usage. Otherwise you are reconciling sales data at the end of each month on a spreadsheet.
Q2. Effect on employees and employers. For the owner, you stop guessing. You know what sold, what shrank, and what to order before you are standing in the walk-in. For staff, the count moves from a clipboard to a phone or tablet. You can still pencil whip a digital count, but you skip the step of writing it down then keying it in. Sometimes you still do that, and now we are using AI to read the handwritten counts, which is almost ideal.
Q3. Main benefits. Fewer outs, less over-ordering, shrink you can track, waste is now something you can control, and a number you can adjust to in real time, not months in the past.
Q4. Issues an employee runs into. Receiving a delivery and forgetting to log it. Counting the wrong unit, cases versus each. Modifiers and recipes that do not deduct the way they expected. Skipping checking in the truck because you are busy, or not noticing
outs/mispicks. Time and discipline.
Q5. How it works and key features. Every item in the catalog has a stock count per location. Sales at the register deduct automatically. You receive stock in, adjust for waste or theft, and set a low-stock alert so you get told before you run out. Reports show movement over time. In Square it is tied straight to the point of sale, so there is no second system to reconcile. For restaurants, it is the same thing except you have recipes that deduct from a group of ingredients fractionally. That is a harder thing, but once set up it functions the same.
Q6. Pros and cons. Pros: accuracy, speed, visibility, and data you can act on. Cons: setup work, a learning curve, a monthly cost at the higher tiers, and the fact that a system is only as honest as the last person who counted.
Q7. Training. Yes, but it is informal in a small business. I train one person well, they train the next shift, and the system itself does a lot of the teaching because the screens are simple. Square has help articles and videos, and the Community is the place people ask when they get stuck.
Q8. Why go digital, and what stops people. What stops them is habit and the fear of the setup week. Procrastination or perfection paralysis. That is the insidious one. They put it off till it is just right, when a GE inventory (good enough) is way better than no inventory. What usually pushes them over the edge is when the business falters or they can’t make payroll, and then you get a rubber band snap and overreaction.
Q9. Competition. Plenty. Square, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed, Shopify, and dozens of standalone inventory tools. Competition is good for owners, because it keeps the basics cheap and pushes everyone to integrate better.
But the elephant in the room on competition is where your question should change, and you go back and point to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, etc. These LLM tools can reproduce all of the things we just talked about. Square, for example, has a fully available MCP server and is quickly opening its tools to your own choice of LLM, or you have their built-in AI Managerbot, which is evolving quickly to help with every step I just discussed.
Good luck with the Leaving Cert. If you need a follow-up quote for the writeup, reply here and I will answer.
Donnie
Multi-Unit Manager | Founder, Table & Ledger
tableandledger.com
Square AI Champion | Using Square since July, 2017
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