Inventory

[woudstrameats]

Hello everyone! My name is Martina, and I am the manager of Woudstra Meat Market. As of now we are only a meat market, although we are working on building a new processing facility so that the location I am currently in can become retail and a food establishment. That being said, the biggest organization issue I'm running into right now is Inventory. How do you, as food establishments, track your inventory and keep track of what is back stock and what of that goes into recipes. I would love any advice.

Thanks!

[Valentina]

I'm going to pull in some folks that use Square's inventory management here, @woudstrameats 🥩🍖

@GourmetOnWheels, @JamesSandbar, @londontea, @MichiganFarmsta, @pessosices, @porktaco, @LLCafe

Any advice or best practices you have to pass along to Martina?
We appreciate your help! 

[pessosices]

Hey @woudstrameats 

That's a great question!

For Back Stock I set up a secondary location that I named X-Inventory so it shows up after my regular location, and in there I put in my back stock all for $0.01. I have a secondary iPad with Square POS loaded up into the secondary Inventory Location, and whenever I open/pull any of my back stock, I mark it as a sale of that inventory item.

There's no real easy way to do this for recipes, but you might be able to manage this same way with some tweaks.

I hope this helps!

[londontea]

Hi @woudstrameats 

I think @pessosices has a great idea on how to manage inventory like this. 

We have two sides to our business: food service (cafe) and tea. For the former, I can’t imagine a way to feasibly manage inventory within any type of system, we make food in such small batches that it’s not worth the time of my bakers to have to keep track of what ingredients they’re using. As a bakery all of our ingredients are fairly simple and cheap: flour, sugar, milk, eggs.

Our loose leaf tea is a different story, and probably the best comparison if you’re making anything at scale. For example, if I have to blend Tea C, which consists of Tea A and Tea B, then I’ll remove 10lbs of Tea A and 20lbs of Tea B, then add 30lbs of Tea C to inventory. It’s a somewhat manual process, but since I only blend in big batches it’s worthwhile. I have all of my teas listed as a unit (ounce), which makes it easy for me to be fairly precise since sometimes I’ll need 143oz of something. I have the cost price entered per unit so that I can easily see the value of my stock in addition to how much I have on hand. I then transfer the tea (physically and in Square’s inventory) to our store location to sell to customers. 

This works if you are not selling direct to consumer from that location. There’s going to be a delay between when I blend the tea and when I update the inventory because I don’t want to update numbers until I’m certain of how much I’ve made. This is not a problem since the Warehouse location does not sell to the public, so the numbers don’t need to be accurate every minute of the day. If I have an employee blending tea then I know not to look at our inventory reports until she’s done. If I did sell to the public from the Warehouse (ie, through online ordering) then that could certainly pose a problem with stock numbers becoming inaccurate.