Restaurant Inventory Management and Pricing Strategies

[ZDeli]

I am curious to hear from other restaurants using Square the tools you are using to track inventory of ingredients and food cost pricing?

For our current location we are doing everything manually with spreadsheets and spreadsheet calculations and it feels less like a science and more like a game. Especially as sourcing becomes more challenging and wholesale costs rise, I want the restaurant to be more precise so we can stay ahead of our inventory and know really when we need to raise prices.

I am looking into Restaurant 365, which has a hefty set up fee and monthly fee of over $300. It does include some amazing tools, that seem worth the price, if used. 

We currently have 1 location and are opening a second, and I am trying to figure out if this investment is worthwhile (it does sync with square, which I like) or if there are other tools out there for us to explore.

[Donnie-M]

@ZDeli That seems awful high to me personally.  I do totally understand you are really trying to track your food cost and what not.  Are you wanting to see your weekly/monthly food cost/prime cost?  

I personally recommend of course pricing your recipes,  and luckily my main vendor PFG has food costing built into the ordering system so once I set up my recipe it will track my ingredient cost even if it changes.  I would recommend costing your top 10 items out to the penny which probably covers 60 or 70% of your sales volume.

I am going to point you in a different direction and it is https://clickbacon.com/ I have worked with Ryan and he uses a 4 week rolling cost of goods sold so you can watch your actual food cost in more real time.  It will integrate with square so all you have to do is upload the daily .csv which is pretty convenient.  He actually doesn't believe in taking those weekly inventories and wasting the labor and man hours to do it.  Instead you watch what you are spending and use a budget to control your costs.  Ryan is a systems guy and I totally recommend his software to try out and it is only $39 bucks a month.  Not as robust as 365 or automated, but way better than excel.

I used to be that really drill down the numbers guy, but really 90% of us have no clue what our real food cost is day to day.  So instead of trying to find that perfect system, I would go with something that lets you see your numbers and then work on the portion control and quality side and stick to looking at those descending dollar reports and just track the high cost high volume items.