Ugh! I Need to Count the Inventory
You worked long hours all week and the door is finally closed. It was a good week, the liquor and beer was flowing, the customers were smiling and the food was served quickly.
Now the work begins. Did we make money you ask yourself? You count the money in the safe and you run the sales reports from the back office POS. It says you sold 198 bottles of Bud Lite, 172 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, you poured 185 drinks of various kinds and served 212 dinner entrée’s and much more itemized inventory counts. So now you have to see if it all reconciles and your cost of goods is in line with your forecast.
You are tired and your family is waiting for you at home but you cannot leave until you know what you have left on the shelf behind the bar, in the cooler and in the stock room. So the counting begins. You begin in the stock room. Cases are easy to count and you finish there quickly, the walk in cooler is quick too. But now you look at the bars. You have beer in the fridge and more than 50 bottles of liquor, most open. You count the beer, wine, whole liquor bottles and eyeball the open bottles. Now hours later you have your numbers to compare to sales.
It’s been a week since you last counted the inventory and when you look at the sales reports, you know you should be doing better. There should be more money in the safe for the items that were sold. Inventory seems to be missing! Where did it go? Did your servers over pour drinks, were there too many buy backs or are some items disappearing out the back door?
As an honest person yourself, you expect all others to be honest as well. If everyone just made sure they accounted for all inventory items sold, collected payment for each and submitted the money at the end of the day, there would be no questions and all items would be accounted for. Nothing would be missing except for the occasional wrong order and spill that would be recorded in the POS register at checkout.
We all know it is not a perfect world and that sometimes people are only as honest as they are compelled to be. So you look at the lost item report and you say “Maybe we counted wrong or we just need to count more often so we can identify the problem.” You think, “I can weigh the open bottles and I will get a more accurate liquor count.” But then you think, “More counting? More time away from family?”
What if you could know continuously, the amount of inventory of an item you should have on the shelf at any one time? You could simply look to see if it is there and if so, you know all of that item is accounted for. You would not need to spend lengthy sessions counting all of your stock, but rather conduct quick checks of various, valuable stock items to ensure they are all accounted for. If a problem of missing stock arises, you can quickly identify where the stock items went because you would know immediately and not a week later.
Remarkably, retail businesses have had this type of inventory accountability for years, but it has not been available for hospitality, until now. Quick View Technologies, Inc. has developed the first fully integrated inventory management tool that gives you instant real time counts of inventory as it is being sold through the POS register. It works on your smartphone or tablet pc to let you know how much of each item should be on the shelf at any one time. You can check your inventory on the fly at the start of a shift, middle or end. You will know at all times your inventory is accounted for. Best of all, you will spend more time with your family rather than counting inventory.
