One of the most important steps in improving your bar’s profitability is to implement an effective bar inventory management program. The problem is, inventory management can be a bar manager’s worst nightmare.
Keeping track of inventory is stressful, time-consuming and complex. Any small mistake made when conducting your inventory counts or calculating inventory usage can have a ripple effect on your perceived profit margins.
The more accurate insights you have into your bar inventory (around things such as inventory totals, on-hand totals, revenue, pour cost, sales and inventory shrinkage), the more you can create an inventory management strategy that focuses on increasing your profits, making smarter ordering decisions and improving the customer experience.
It’s true, you can do this by manually using a bar inventory spreadsheet. But this method is time-consuming and leads to errors that impact the profitability of your entire business. In fact, you’ve probably already tried to do this and suffered the consequences.
Instead, your business should use a bar inventory app.
What is a bar inventory app?
A bar inventory app is a mobile phone application, typically available on iOS and Android devices, that has been specifically created to give bar managers improved insights into their inventory usage.
By entering accurate inventory counts into a bar inventory app, bar managers are able to automate the processes around inventory usage calculations so that they can make better choices regarding how they use and purchase inventory in the future.
By customizing these KPIs to what truly matters to your bar, a bar inventory app gives your business unique insights into how to improve profit margins, make smarter ordering decisions and better use your existing inventory stock.
With a bar inventory app, bar managers can:
- Reduce inventory waste that impacts your profit margins.
- Gain better insights into stock so that you can make better ordering decisions.
- Avoid common errors that give you misleading inventory calculations.
- Compare inventory usage with sales data to learn what truly drives customer satisfaction and more sales.
5 Benefits of using a bar inventory app
- Gain insights that improve your profitability
KPIs and actionable insights are what drive the future success of your bar. The more you are able to leverage data and reports, the more you can make business improvements that drive up the profitability of your business.
A bar inventory app gives you the data you need in one seamless and centralized platform. You can access unique insights, reports and calculations all from your smartphone, giving you an easy and simplified way to quickly improve your profit margins.
- Automate complicated calculations
Inventory management is complicated, and there are a tonne of calculations that go into getting all of the KPIs and data you need - whether it be inventory usage, PAR levels for ordering or inventory shrinkage.
A bar inventory app will make these calculations easy. You can customize all of the reports that you need, and as long as you are conducting inventory counts consistently and integrating your app with other systems like your point-of-sale technology, then your bar inventory app will do inventory calculations for you and provide you with the data you need to make business improvements.
- Speed up the time it takes to conduct bar inventory counts
Using manual spreadsheets to conduct bar inventory counts is incredibly time-consuming for your team. You have to measure each inventory item manually, find the correct product on the spreadsheet and then input the data.
The use of a bar inventory app makes this process significantly easier. Bar inventory apps use innovative technologies to automate this process, with barcode scanning, huge databases of products and electronic weighing to make the entire process more efficient.
- Simplify your ordering processes
With a bar inventory app you can simplify and automate your ordering processes. Bar inventory apps typically allow you to use inventory calculations to set your period automatic replenishment levels for each product item, and then based on that data you can generate purchase orders directly in the application and share those with your vendors for easy product ordering.
Interested in learning more about the benefits of a bar inventory app, and how your business can use one to improve its profitability? Get in touch with the Sculpture Hospitality team of bar inventory management experts today. We’d love to help your bar grow.
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