Orderly experts recently sat down with Steve Moody, our Digital Product Marketing Manager, to discuss his experience with inventory during his career as a Chef.
Find out how he tackled the tedious task and the game changing solution he found that made the process quick and easy.
Taking inventory was like nails on a chalk board. While chewing on a broken bottle. In a burning building.
But worse.
Inventory management for a restaurant can be a cross between gibberish and long division. In fact, it’s such a pain that the task can often fall to the bottom of the to-do list, where it sits unchecked for the week. Then weeks turn into months.
I don’t need to explain why taking inventory is important. You know it’s important.
I remember my old restaurant days. Sunday night was our designated inventory day. The kitchen team would break up the inventory list so we could get through it quicker. I’d take the walk-in; Jenny took dry goods; Ben took the alcohol closet; we all rushed to count what was on the shelves and filled in our spreadsheets.
Needless to say, the problem with our inventory process was immediately clear.
Nothing ever lined up correctly.
Big ticket items were always being counted lower than expected and out of nowhere someone would stumble upon three 50lb bags of AP flour.
Our kitchen was a disorganized mess. Items were spread out EVERYWHERE, making counting them extremely difficult.
Lemons? They could be found in the bar area, walk-in fridge, even dry storage.
See that case of avocados over there? I would count it as half a case. Jenny would count it as half a case half the time and two-thirds the rest of the times and Ben walked right by it just trying to get out of the restaurant before midnight. Counting discrepancies were unavoidable.
At the end of the day, we were spending so much time taking inventory and the information we received was still wrong.
By the time we got our Cost of Goods Sold and inventory for May it was the second week of June. We were always reacting on old information instead of course-correcting immediately.
There had to be a better way.
Enter Orderly.
The solution to this inventory problem is to implement a system that transcends the variability of your staff, doesn’t require hours of work on your end and gives you up to date reporting so that you can make decisions today before you have a problem tomorrow.
Orderly simulates an inventory and backs into your weekly Cost of Goods Sold without you having to count a single product! No more relying on Ben and Jenny to take inventory!
By simply snapping photos of invoices and entering POS sales data, you will receive weekly Cost of Goods Sold, highlighting where potential problems may be costing you!
Prefer to take a physical inventory? Orderly has you covered!
Easily set up your inventory by using Orderly’s categories OR build custom “shelf to sheet” inventory lists. Milk lives in the walk-in, flour in Dry Storage, you get the idea.
As you count, on hand dollar amounts will be automatically calculated and beginning and ending inventories will show you exactly what you went through over a given period.
Orderly will continue working for you, whether your team has hours to spend counting inventory this week or they need to rely on our auto-COGS next week.
Rising prices of ingredients, over ordering and product waste can all lead to a high food cost.
Knowing that you have a high food cost is one thing. Identifying why your food cost is high is like finding a needle in a haystack. Orderly is going to help you shrink that haystack, so you can easily find the needle and the culprit for your rising food costs.
Would you rather spend 5 hours a week counting inventory or 5 minutes a day in Orderly?
Schedule a live walkthrough of Orderly’s food cost management solution!