One Thing That Will Help You Keep Accurate Stock in Your Restaurant or Bar

The great majority of the items on your menu are made up of several other items — the ingredients they are made from. If you want to know the exact stock of those ingredients at any moment, you need to track how they are consumed in real time.

The easiest way to track that consumption is to define precise recipes for each item on the menu.

What is a recipe? A recipe is a list of the items (ingredients) that go into the finished item you sell. Besides the item name, a recipe includes the quantity required, and optionally an allowance for wastage. So you can think of a recipe as a kind of formula for producing the finished product.

Example: 1 Gin and Tonic (finished item) consists of the following: Gin 0.03 l Tonic 0.08 l Lemon 0.005 kg Straw 1 pc

What kinds of recipe are there? There are recipes that define a composite item, as in the gin and tonic example above. There are also recipes consisting of just one item. Spirits are an example: a single measure of brandy is a certain fraction of a litre of brandy. What is distinctive here is that the brandy comes in by the litre while the finished item is normally sold by the piece, so the reduction of the incoming item measured in litres has to be handled properly when the sale is recorded in pieces.

How can you record recipes? Once you decide to create recipes for your establishment, there are several ways to go about it:

• You can keep a notebook and write all the recipes down in it. In this case you have no way at all of tracking ingredient consumption — recipes written down like this serve only as a reminder of how the finished item is made and what goes into it.
• You can build the recipes in Excel. If you build recipes in Excel, you could probably invest some time and get Excel to track ingredient consumption for you. Tracking this way normally takes a lot of time, though, because you have to work in Excel in parallel and enter everything that is rung up and recorded on the till.
• You can enter the recipes into business software connected to your POS. This is far and away the best option, because it automates the entire process. Here, once a sale is recorded on the POS, the business software automatically removes the ingredients from stock, produces the finished item from them and puts it on stock, then records the sale — that is, removes the finished item from stock again.

TiramisuERP makes it simple to enter recipes and connect them to the POS in your establishment, so that you know your exact stock in real time at any moment.