Waitresses like to complain that they have the toughest job on Earth. Anyone who has ever owned a restaurant, however, knows that theirs is far worse. Managing the budget and inventory for a restaurant requires you to become an oracle. You have to look at the sales of the past to determine what to buy for the future. Items lose their freshness at different rates, and different days of the week are bigger seafood days than others. There’s a lot to consider in these budgeting attempts, and most restaurant owners actually try to go it alone. Restaurant owners don’t tend to think of their products as stock and inventory in quite the same way that other businesses do, and it’s time that that stopped. An upgrade to a mobile point of sale system that includes a barcode reader could be all it takes to get your inventory back on track quickly and easily, because this digital proof of what you have will interface with your sales and help you see the patterns of what you need.
Barcodes Can Be Printed on Menu Guides
One problem that restaurants frequently have that doesn’t seem to be linked to inventory (but is) is time. People take a long time to be seated, they take a long time to order, then to get their food, then to eat it. Often they wind up wasting a lot of time at every stage. This leaves you with fewer seating possibilities over all, fewer meals can be sold, and you’re making less money than you could if the process was streamlined and everyone came, got their food, ate, and left in a timely manner. How is this related to inventory? Simple. A poorly organized, poorly itemized inventory leads to kitchen problems all night long. How often do you think your kitchen staff will send a waitress running for a carton of milk or vegetable broth? When the inventory is poorly organized it can take her a very long time to find it. Barcodes are great for organizing your space, as they easily allow common items to be grouped together and will essentially provide a blueprint for when your waitress is looking in the right place. This is the second step (after “put a barcode on all products”) in Small Business’s guide to organizing your business’s inventory.
Plus, you can store recipe information in a barcode. Storing product information is something that barcodes are excellent at. This means that you can make a unique barcode for every dish that your servers can “scan” with a barcode reader when they’re putting the bill together. They can also scan it to take a look at what goes into the meal. Is the sauce gluten free? Rather than running back and bothering a cook at work, your server can just scan the item and take a look down the list of ingredients. If it’s not gluten free, she can report back to the table at once, a crisis can be averted, and your happy customer can order something else that they’d like a bit more. This really speeds up the process while also helping you find out where the overlap is between dishes. That way you don’t order more zucchini and squash thinking that all the onions are being used in the vegetable stew when really, everyone has been ordering onion rings.
Helps You Keep Track of Freshness
Barcodes help you buy with pinpoint accuracy as opposed to just buying everything in bulk at a set time. This can help you keep a handle on freshness. After all, you want to be clear that you’re getting the best foot, and the freshest ingredients, at the best price possible. They also let you can see when items that you haven’t been using should probably be chopped down and used for stock instead of the main course. Barcoded information can also be easily put into spreadsheets and graphs so you can chart the rate of consumption.
Increases Tips for Waiters
On top of everything else that barcodes can do for your inventory, they can also help keep your servers happy. The quicker the service, the better the tips, is a general rule; being able to whip out the mobile point of sale system at the table isn’t going to hurt either. Digital payments include a hefty uptick in tips. You could see your servers earning as much as 12 percent more than they used to, according to Bon Apetit. One button tipping makes people more likely to give generously, which will make your servers happier and more helpful. With all of that on the line, it’s pretty clear that a barcode reader and a point of sale system upgrade can get your restaurant’s hectic inventory back on track.
A small, wireless barcode scanner offered by Shopify are best for restaurant uses as they are lightweight, easy to handle, and they fit quite nicely in a pocket.
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