How the Right Restaurant Tech Can Save Your Restaurant
Margins in the restaurant industry are thinner than the blade of sushi knife. Every day you read about restaurants that are closing. Here in Chicago, even restaurants that boast Michelin stars, great customer reviews, and a celebrity chef, are closing their doors. So how can restaurant operators make sure their restaurants find the type of success that means longevity and serving diners for years on end? One smart way is to find the right technology services that help grow profits and repair the holes in your bottom line.
The biggest profit center for full-service restaurants is the bar. So it’s important that each aspect of your beverage program has a positive impact on your bottomline. You can make your bar program more profitable by simply changing how you do everyday tasks.
Because alcohol sales can be the difference between going bust or keeping your doors open, you have to make sure you’re not losing money on your liquor.
With inventory management software and distributor ordering services, you can turn tasks that were once just housekeeping duties into strategies that drive profits and put more money into your bank account.
Inventory Services
Luckily, there has never been more services available to help you stay organized and in control of your liquor inventory. Here are a few reasons to consider using an app for inventory to improve your bar’s finances.
- It speeds up counting inventory. Performing regular physical inventory counts is long, tedious and mind-numbing. Doing inventory in a fraction of the time cuts labor costs, while staff that does the counting is a tiny bit happier.
- It better tracks your history over time. Spreadsheets are good for entering and storing data at a single point in time, but databases are much better for tracking products over time (not just counts, but also costs).
- It provides financial and operational intelligence to help you improve your beverage program. Sure, if you are an Excel Wizard you can program those things yourself, but often times inventory software will provide extensive reporting capabilities so you can quickly and easily evaluate the performance of your beverage program.
Change How You Think About Inventory with Reporting
It’s important that you look at inventory as not just an act of counting, but a way to make sure your bar isn’t losing money.
Poor inventory control can be the reason a restaurant goes out of business. Hundreds of restaurants use Uncorkd’s digital menus to manage their menus and increase alcohol sales. And with the inventory management service in Uncorkd, our customers can find out crucial information by taking deep dives into their liquor inventory data with inventory reports.
Here are some of the ways that inventory reports change how you approach inventory. You can answer critical questions about the financial health of your bar program like:
- What is my inventory value on hand of red vs. white vs. sparkling wine?
- What is my inventory value on hand of cabernet vs. merlot vs. pinot noir?
- What distributors have I ordered the most from to negotiate better pricing?
- What do I sell more of, scotch or bourbon?
- How has my purchasing of red vs. white wine changed between winter and summer?
- How much rosé did I order for Mother’s Day weekend last year?
Having the answer to questions like these will help you get control of your liquor inventory and provide necessary insights that lower your liquor costs so your restaurant is more profitable.
Streamlining How You Order With Distributors
Another way to use a tech service to make your bar program more efficient is to use an ordering system that also tracks where your money is going.
Do you have a budget for ordering? If not, you should stop what you’re doing a put together a weekly liquor budget right now.
One of the biggest hassles with ordering is taking the time to write out orders and then send them to each individual sales rep.
But using the right tech service for distributor ordering can speed up the process and make it less hectic. Uncorkd offers distributor purchasing that allows you to place all liquor orders at one time, without the need to contact each distributor individually.
Building Orders Faster
Restaurants that use Uncorkd for their digital wine and beverage menus can quickly put together orders right from their menu selection.
It’s as simple as adding items to a shopping cart, assigning the right distributor, and hitting a single button to email each order to each distributor at once.
It’s faster than writing down orders with a pen and paper, and without the need to send out separate orders to your distributors.
Order History and Saving Invoices
Do you ever review your order histories to see how often you order a particular product? Or to see how much sparkling wine you bought for New Year’s Eve last year? When you put together orders on paper, it’s really difficult to stay organized and reference past orders.
But with Uncorkd, all your orders are saved in a single location. It makes for much better organization. Here’s some of the benefits of a digital ordering service:
- Automatically add received orders into your inventory counts
- Review past orders to make decisions about which products to carry
- Reference past orders for special events to make sure you don’t over-order or under-order.
- Save digital copies of distributor invoices
- Track weekly purchases to help stay within your budget
- See how much money you spend with each distributor to gain leverage with them
How Order Reports Can Change Your Ordering Strategy
Just like inventory reports offer great insights into the state of your liquor room and back bar, order reports give you very important information about how your spending money. Here are some of the ways you can use order reports.
- Track weekly purchases to stay within your budget
- See how much money you are spending with each distributor
- Quickly see the last time you ordered a product
- See how your liquor budget is being spent
Why Restaurants Are Turning to Tech
So many restaurants are turning to technology to help improve their business. From collecting information and data on customers to using digital menus and inventory apps, new technology services are changing how restaurants operate.
One of the biggest reasons smart restaurant operators are adopting tech services is to collect data to analyze it and make better decisions that increase the chance of success.
That’s why using an inventory service offers so much value. It’s not just about making it faster to do inventory. It’s how restaurants can use that information to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Being able to run an inventory report with the click of a button means you have a better understanding, and more control, of your bar program.
It’s important to find the right service to fit your needs. If digital menus, inventory management, and product ordering services could help your restaurant be more successful, then click here to learn more about Uncorkd.
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