During this time of uncertainty surrounding the restaurant industry and how long it will take to recover to pre-COVID levels, we must find ways to control the costs associated with running a restaurant by engaging proper restaurant cost control measures.
Here we list out some nifty ways through which you can clamp down on the spending that might help you stretch your restaurant's budget a little longer.
One of the areas where the most money is being spent repeatedly is the raw materials involved in preparing the food. Using some techniques, we can bring down the cost associated with maintaining an enormous and fresh inventory for your restaurant. The first thing would be to have a robust inventory management system for restaurants into which precise data has been fed. Using this data, we can compare it with a physical audit of the current inventory each week and find the difference between the data collected from the inventory management system and the data by physically checking the list. The range difference can be minimal as is expected. Furthermore, if the difference shoots up above 5%, proper steps need to be taken to minimize the difference and save the costs associated with purchasing more inventory.
One of the other ways you can control restaurant costs is by making intelligent purchase decisions at the right time. While purchasing stock or inventory for your restaurant you can look to cut down on doing cash transactions. Instead, you can look towards acquiring goods on a credit basis and, that way you can look towards reducing high-value transactions and keeping restaurant costs under control.
The other way of keeping restaurant costs under control is to be a part of a larger purchase group. A purchasing group can be a group of restaurant owners that require similar inventory for each of their restaurants. Being a part of this larger group gives you higher bargaining power which translates to savings on money spent on raw materials. Building a relationship with these vendors once you have made regular payments is another way to reduce costs associated with purchasing raw materials for your restaurant.
Having a Cloud-Based Point of Sale System for Restaurants that keeps note of all the transactions taking place in your restaurant will help you forecast future demand. Forecasting future demand is a powerful tool for your restaurant through which you can exercise decisions or purchase raw materials ahead of time to manage the surge in demand. It allows you to establish agreements ahead of time which helps you bring down the cost further. Restaurant cost control is easier if you have a Cloud-Based Point of Sale System coupled with an inventory management system for better efficiency.
A simple way to keep restaurant food costs low is through maintaining proper portion control for each of the items sold in your restaurant. Establishing a process through which you can cook dishes without spillage or wastage is essential as it involves less raw material wastage. Some of the protein items like chicken, fish, mutton, etc., must be divided accurately into fixed portions that are then separated and cooked based on the customer's demand.
One of the others ways of restaurant cost control is by way of efficient employee management. By making sure that the employee attrition rate in your restaurant is low we can cut down on cost and time associated with training new employees for your restaurant. Having an employee management system for restaurants embedded in your Cloud-Based Point of Sale System you can keep track of all the employees and their shifts efficiently without overworking them which is one of the reasons employees quit their job. While hiring new workers try to outline their responsibilities clearly so they can choose to take up the position or not. Evaluating employee performance to improve efficiency is also another way to bring down costs associated with running your restaurant in the long run. The other way to cut down on costs is to clamp down on pilfering of raw materials if occurring in your restaurant. By hiring the right kind of staff you can avoid some of these issues and further bring down the costs associated.
There are new solutions that can help automate some areas of the restaurant that will help you control the costs associated with running your restaurant. The first would be to choose a Cloud-Based Point of Sale System as they run on the SAAS model and don't have a hefty amount upfront. The other would be to set up a contactless food ordering solution for your restaurant that will allow customers to send orders to the kitchen directly. It will help you to control the number of staff working in your restaurant and shift costs elsewhere where required. Having a restaurant order-taking app seriously reduces your restaurant costs and also reduces your dependency on manpower to run your restaurant.
Keeping a regular track of your restaurants' expenditure and the revenue generated by your restaurant regularly in the form of weekly reports will shed light on how well your restaurant is being run. By going in-depth of these weekly reports you can see where the bulk of your cash is being spent and how it can be better utilized. For that, you would require a Cloud-Based Point of Sale System that has a report based on each aspect associated with running the restaurant. From knowing how many items were sold in a week to the amount spent on inventory a robust Cloud-Based Point of Sale System for Restaurants helps you see just that.
By following some of the above techniques you can bring down the costs associated with running your restaurant.
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, DiNAMIC
21st April 2021