Taking Stock

Use your point-of-sale system to monitor inventory for accurate ordering forecasts, controlling food costs and minimizing waste.

BY TRACY MORIN

With inflation rates and gas prices soaring, everyone has been feeling the squeeze in the first half of 2022—making this a crucial time to keep food costs in check, for both your sake and your customers’. Luckily, your POS system can prove an important tool for ensuring profitability and counteracting rising prices. “Your food costs and your labor costs are your biggest expenses when it comes to your restaurant,” notes Chris Ciabarra, owner of Athena Security, based in Austin, Texas, and former co-founder of Revel Systems. “Get them under control by using a good inventory system on your POS.”

But what makes a good inventory system? We gathered expert opinions on key POS features to seek and utilize when it comes to keeping your inventory in check, from analyzing past sales to enabling accurate future forecasting.

Selection and Setup

Inventory control can be difficult to implement, so owners should seek a POS solution that handles all aspects of inventory fluidly, according to Dave Arnold, owner and founder of e-Coast Systems, an IT company based in Charleston, South Carolina, that specializes in working with bars and restaurants. “Many POS systems require a third-party integration to do it well, but the initial setup is crucial— you really get out what you put in,” Arnold explains. “So, when choosing a POS system for the pizza business, I recommend looking for systems that already have the inventory module refined. If the module is too difficult to set up, or slow in action, owners and management commonly get frustrated and just go back to doing everything manually.”

Arnold has a few feature suggestions: Can you enter items, recipes, vendors, pars and food costs into the system, along with their location (walk-in, rear chest freezer, etc.)? Can you set notifications of low stocks to help trigger orders, so that purchase orders (POs) are created and received right in the system? “When purchase orders are created from the system, users just need to make sure food costs are updated and accurate before the PO is placed to ensure reporting is accurate when it comes to profitability,” Arnold adds.

Meanwhile, Bob Vergidis, chief visionary officer for pointofsale.cloud in Cincinnati, says owners should seek a solution that allows them to take control of their technology while streamlining the way they manage all aspects of their business, from customer-facing transactions to backof-the-house operations. He notes that