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What is Storage and Inventory Control in the Restaurant Industry?

February 15, 2022
4 mins reading

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Revenue is essential for your restaurant's growth, but keeping the operational costs down is equally critical. Storage control generally allows you to keep track of expenses and minimize spoilage. Investing in software that will enable you to conduct inventory control seamlessly has always been the best approach for many restaurants around the world to keep track of your restaurant inventory. 

In this article, you can find any information from the basics to how it will affect your restaurant’s cost.

What Is Storage Control?

Before you begin to learn how it will affect your restaurant cost, we must equate our perception about storage or inventory control. Storage or inventory control is about the process of maintaining the correct quantity of what's in your storage room. It also includes keeping track of your products' components supply vendors, ensuring a consistent flow of stock availability, and preserving an ideal quantity of stock on hand.

Inventory in the food and beverage industry typically covers items, such as ingredients, food, liquor and beverages, kitchen equipment, and staff uniforms. Many experts advise that those items should be categorized into non-food goods, food, and liquor.

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How Can Storage Control Affect Your Restaurant Cost?

Storage management dramatically affects the success of the restaurant industry. Proper inventory control allows you to reduce a lot of things, such as: 

  • wastage of food and ingredients, 
  • increase profits, 
  • keep customers satisfied, 
  • decrease work with suppliers, and
  • lower total costs.

For instance, food prices generally account for somewhere between 28% and 35% of a restaurant's overall costs. If storage control is not conducted correctly, it will lead to waste or spoilage of food ingredients and products, eventually increasing the total cost. 

What Is the Worst Scenario from Bad Storage Control that You Need to Avoid?

Poor inventory control can lead to various problems, one of them being missed sales and customers due to understocking. Customers will move elsewhere when they don't find the desired item in your business, and your business might suffer from a long-term impact if this occurrence happens during a peak buying season.

One of Nimbly’s customers estimates that they may lose around $126,000 annually if they don't take action on their storage controls and turn them digital by partnering with Nimbly and using the Nimbly app in their daily operations.

Bad storage management can also lead to over-stocking, which causes the loss of a large sum of money. Inventory has a finite shelf life—especially in F&B industries—because of the degradation, spoilage, or obsolescence of material. Your business' tied-up money will lose should your stock exceed its storage life.

In addition, inefficiency is another problem that arises due to poor stock management. It could even worsen in industries with multiple branches still utilizing manual tools to perform and report inventory control.

Fortunately, you can avoid all the above issues by utilizing Nimbly, a digital solution that allows you to transform your business's manual operational processes into a digital one. It includes the storage control procedure, which will become much more efficient. 

How to Do Storage Control Properly?

The old way of tracking inventory is by using pen and paper. One needs to list every item available in the storage room. The step-up method from pen and paper is by using a spreadsheet or excel. However, both of these ways are prone to data inaccuracies.

Companies that follow best inventory control practices put all information on one data platform and keep it accurate and up to date. You can do the same by using a mobile app promoting automated inventory control. 

Using software only is not enough. First, you need to create a plan for when and by whom the inventory tracking should be conducted. Expert advises using the same staff to conduct inventory since they will be much more efficient and quickly spot inconsistencies and trends.

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What do You need to Ensure in Storage Control?

It's a good idea to utilize an automated system to perform inventory control. A well-designed software to conduct the said procedure will help you save time and provide real-time information regarding your stock availability.

Before utilizing any software, you need to ensure everyone in your team understands every bit of the platform. Make sure your employees are well-trained in using the app. Don't rush them in the hopes of saving time and energy. Training on a brand new app should take as long as it requires people to understand it fully. 

Make Your Storage Control More Accurate

It becomes vitally important to have excellent systems in place for your restaurant industry to continue to survive in this day and age. Suppose you're still using pen and paper techniques for inventory control. In that case, it's the right time to invest in software to streamline the process. Nimbly is one such automated system with a mobile app.

Nimbly comes with a Digital Checklist feature that allows you to digitalize your paper-based checklist and transform them into insights that everyone in your team with authority can access. Nimbly’s app also features Geo-fencing, where you need to be at the exact storage location to perform storage or inventory control inspections.

The validation has become more robust because it also requires the auditor to capture a photo or video at the exact location. It can also validate any variances so that follow-up actions can be done accurately. With Nimbly, gaining accurate data on storage control inspection is no longer a taxing task.

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