Restaurant Inventory Management Features Must Have

1. It allows you to add recipe and sub recipe for a menu Item and a place for yield.

We all know what recipe is, it is the breakdown of the ingredients, raw materials, direct materials used to prepare and serve
an item on the menu, including miscellaneous items such as the colorful, lovely packaging for your takeaway orders.

On the other hand, sub recipes are recipe that are produced or prepared to be use for another recipe. One concrete example of
this is Dough, which is used for several recipe items such as Manakish or Pizza. If you are one of the restaurants who produce its
own dough, then you are probably familiar that ingredients such as Flour, water, salt and yeast are used to make it.

Yield, is the quantity of the processed product, or it can be viewed as the amount that is usable after an ingredient is peeled,
cooked, produced or butchered.

For Example: 1 kilogram of flour with other ingredients mixed together can make 1.3 kilogram or dough, or for a kilo of broccoli only
500 grams is usable after the stems are trimmed.

Out of the 1.3 kilogram of dough, you should identify how many grams you used for 1 order of Pizza or 1 order of Manakish,
both have different amount of dough use. In that way, the software will properly calculate the percentage of the ingredients
that will be deducted for every piece of pizza or manakish sold.

Dough’s shelf life is 7 days maximum, instead of issuing out flour , yeast , water from inventory when the dough is wasted,
you just have to issue out the amount of dough wasted, and it will automatically deduct all the ingredients used to process
the quantity of dough issued out.

2. It allows you to enter purchases

To monitor accurately the movement of your inventory, your POS Software should have the capability to enter your purchases.
Vendors details should be added in the software and It’s great if you can initiate the Purchase Order directly from the POS software .
Once the items are delivered and received, the POS software will automatically add the items on the inventory, adjusting your
quantity on hand.

3. It Should calculate your COGS

Cost of goods sold is not the amount you bought for your restaurant rather it’s the amount of the ingredients or items used
during the operation. By connecting your purchases to your POS’s inventory module, you will understand the cost of the
Ingredients use per servings.

When you punch an item, other than automatically deducting the ingredients it should calculate the amount of the ingredients used,
thereby giving you the picture of your real food cost.

4. It allows you transfer stocks to different branches

It is very essential to have this function when you are running restaurant with multiple locations or department. It is inevitable that
there are times, that one department will borrow amount of stocks to the other. Item transfer functions allows you to track the
inventory movements across departments.

5. It should have notification for Inventory levels and Item Expiration

It is very important to know when an item reach in minimum or maximum reorder level. Minimum reorder level is the quantity
that will trigger you to reorder a certain item, avoiding stock out, maximum level on the other hand is the specific number of items
that you should held on a time, to avoid holding up unnecessary high level of stocks.

Notification should be done as well when items are near to expire, allowing you to adjust your menu items for the next days to
utilize the items that are near to expire.

Having a strong inventory management in place would deter theft and wastage and helps you out to properly determine your food cost.
Avoid and stop throwing money down the drain by using a POS Software with a reliable Inventory Module that have the functions mentioned
on this article.

Did I missed some points? Comment below to help out people who might be reading this article.