Running a bar or restaurant takes your full commitment, focus, and concentration today. You need to manage and cope with multiple responsibilities at once. Inventory and product control are among the most difficult to master.
And managing your bar inventory is very important to your bar’s success. Taking daily inventory guarantees you’ll have enough drinks for each shift. You can harness the power of technology to help you keep track of your financial performance. Devices can provide information to calculate which products sell and which don’t.
Good inventory management can help generate detailed reports that outline your operating expenses, profits, and losses. This way, you can change your inventory and the way you order.
In this article, we’ll discuss why you should use technology to take inventory in a bar and what tech to use.
What Is Bar Inventory Tech?
Bar inventory technology like an app helps you manage and control your stock directly using a tablet, smartphone, or another mobile device. You download it to your phone and gain easy access to an automated inventory process.
The best bar inventory apps have similar functions and features, including:
- Access to historical data
- Methods for measuring (Bluetooth scale, virtual point count, or slider)
- Ability to count inventory across multiple devices
- Automatic invoicing and ordering with suppliers
Bar inventory apps let you analyze and evaluate your bar sales through integration with your POS system using variance reports. You have more control over the profit margin when you have more control over the inventory process.
To paraphrase a popular saying, a fool, and his bar are soon parted. Keeping good financial records is like driving well. You’re always informed about your speed and direction. Without them, you simply don’t have control. Good accounting extends to good inventory control. All bars need to manage inventory. This stock is your money sitting on a shelf. It comprises a big part of your business investment. Obviously, only watching your shelves doesn’t suffice to maintain the right balance between the right amount of stock and likely demand. The slow-moving stock becomes costly without sufficient control.
Why Do You Need Technology?
As the bar manager, taking inventory is a compulsory task. There is no other way to manage your costs and to know when it’s time to reorder. By taking regular inventory, you also check for theft and loss. Unfortunately, both are very common in the hospitality sector.
1. Manage Labor Costs Better
Using an inventory app reduces labor-related expenses. If you’re still taking inventory manually, you must be paying someone to take inventory for you. These expenses add up over a period of time.
2. Limit Errors
At the end of every shift, you know how many drinks and snacks you sold. You’ll know, by taking inventory, if you have enough at the front of the house. Using a bar inventory app minimizes the errors that occur when you do inventory manually.
3. Analyze Business Expenses
Most bar inventory tech devices feature unique reports that track user information. An example is how much your bartender is spilling. Bar inventory apps offer managers data that can harness costs and improve customer service. They are quite unlike the excel spreadsheets of yore that we used to do inventory manually.
4. Reduced Risk
POS technology reduces both the risk of low efficiency and technical risk. Which companies have the lowest-tech risk? Those that invest in cloud computing. They bring technical infrastructure down to the bare necessities. You can cut costs a great deal without compromising your IT operations.
5. Save Time
The ability to do inventory on a mobile device means that inventory counts are entered into the inventory management software for you automatically.
6. Ensures High Efficiency
At the heart of cloud-based POS, technology is the user experience. It is the easiest to use, reducing human error to a minimum. Inventory tracking via the cloud is intuitive. It reduces risk by preventing frustration, loss of time and efficiency, and higher costs of customer support. It follows that the risk of unsatisfied customers is also lower.
Recent studies show that bars worldwide have become up to 20 percent more efficient just by tracking inventory in the cloud. Cloud tech offers quick sharing capabilities, which have led to a dramatic increase in ease of management and their productivity. Bars of all sizes need to be able to take inventory in real-time. POS inventory management devices let managers track and collect data. Such devices are handheld inventory scanners.
You can access cloud-based inventory data from traditional desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, and any other Internet-enabled devices.
7. Flexibility
You don’t even have to be on location to use web-based inventory programs. You can see how the bar’s going while you’re traveling or at home.
8. Security
Relying on your POS system is one thing, but we recommend installing CCTV cameras in your bar and storage area. You’ll find this move really smart.
People who run a bar need to be sure every single ingredient that goes into the snacks and cocktails on the menu is recorded. If you’re doing this manually, you’re probably counting all these items every day. It’s becoming an obsession. You’re taking all this time to count everything that is countable. You’re updating and recording ingredients, weighing everything that needs to be weighed, then getting a staff member to do it all over again just to make sure you didn’t make a mistake.
9. Prevent Overstocking
Anytime you know supplies are coming in, you’re making sure you’ve completed a manual inventory take. The risk of overstocking becomes minute.
10. When Taking Inventory Becomes an Obsession
We can’t dispute the fact that if you do all this day in and day out, you have a firm grasp on the inventory of your bar. Thus, you have a very good idea of how much stuff you should order from your supplies at any given time of the year, making the most out of your investment. The idea is that technology can take this responsibility and task off your hands.
