Do You Take Inventory, or Does Inventory Take You?

The Massachusetts Restaurant Association (MRA) and RealFood President Ed Doyle surveyed MRA members on how they execute various operating procedures. When it comes to good restaurant business practices, some members confirmed they follow them, and some admitted they don’t. Find out how you fit into the landscape of best practices.

Everyone should do inventory. Doing inventory and doing it often is not only a security measure; it’s the only way to accurately reconcile your cost of goods. How else can you correlate your sales to what you re using?

Frequently, when a client has a problem, we suggest they do a weekly inventory. It’s a pain, it’s time consuming but it gets their cost of goods on track and generates information that’s essential to a well-functioning business.

As a practice, taking inventory is only worthwhile if you re doing it right, ideally weekly or monthly. It is key to make sure your spreadsheet or database are accurate with current prices, pack sizes and inventory count units Without that accuracy, there is no reason to do monitoring as the results will be inaccurate. In other words, if you have garbage going in, you’re going to have garbage going out. The only thing more dangerous than no data is inaccurate data.