Restaurant inventory and stocktaking: a beginner's guide

A restaurant keeps money in two places: the cash drawer and the storeroom. The drawer is counted every day. The storeroom, in many venues, is not counted even once a month. The largest cost line in the business sits in a blind spot.

What stock control actually consists of

Despite the intimidating name, it is built from four simple pieces:

1. The item list — what you hold
2. Receiving — what came in
3. Consumption — what went out
4. Balance — what is there now

Each piece has its own standard trap. Let us take them in order.

1. The item list: one product, one entry

The most common mistake is the same product entered under several names. Today it is oil, tomorrow cottonseed oil, the day after oil 5 L. Three months later there are three entries and the balance will never reconcile.

The rule is simple: the name describes the product, not the packaging. Pack size and volume belong in a separate field. The right to create new entries should sit with one or two people, not with everyone.

Units of measure

There are two units and they get mixed up constantly:

• Purchase unit — sack, case, crate, pack
• Usage unit — kilogram, litre, piece

Records are always kept in the usage unit. If a drink arrives in packs of 24, it enters stock as 24 pieces. Otherwise the recipe card counts pieces, the storeroom counts packs, and your books split into two separate realities.

2. Receiving: the weakest link

Three things get recorded on delivery: what, how much and at what price. The third is usually skipped, and the costing stays frozen at old prices forever.

What works in practice:

• The buyer and the receiver are different people. Not bureaucracy — basic control.
• Weight is checked on arrival, not copied off the delivery note. With meat and vegetables a gap is routine.
• Every delivery price is stored. When the same product arrives at different prices, a weighted average keeps the costing close to reality.

3. Consumption: three channels

Product leaves the storeroom by three routes, and all three must be recorded:

Through sales

When a dish is sold, its recipe card ingredients are deducted. This is the main channel, and without automation everything else is pointless — nobody deducts 8 to 10 ingredients by hand on every bill.

Waste

Burnt, spoiled, dropped. Do not be afraid to record it: unrecorded waste does not disappear, it simply reappears as an unexplained shortage at the next stocktake.

Staff meals

Staff food consumes ingredients too. Track it as its own line — otherwise it hides inside food cost and the kitchen looks inefficient for no reason.

4. Stocktaking: the reality check

A stocktake compares the recorded balance with what is physically on the shelf. It produces one number: the variance.

How to run one

1. Freeze stock movement during the count: nothing in, nothing out
2. Count in pairs — one weighs, one writes
3. Do not print the recorded balance on the count sheet, or it will simply be copied across
4. Reconcile against the records only after counting is finished

How often

A full stocktake once a month is enough. But the 20 to 30 most expensive and most vulnerable items — meat, oil, alcohol, dairy — deserve a weekly count. That short list usually accounts for most of the money moving through the storeroom.

Reading the variance

A small gap is normal: scale accuracy, natural shrinkage, rounding. These signals deserve attention:

• One item drifting always in the same direction is not chance
• A shortage and a surplus appearing together means a wrong recipe card or two items being confused
• Variance growing month over month means receiving has broken down

Where to start

1. Take your 30 most expensive items — do not try to cover the whole storeroom at once
2. Give each one name and one usage unit
3. For a week, record only deliveries and nothing else
4. The following week, add a waste log
5. At month end, count those 30 items and look at the variance
6. If the gap is large, check the process before you question the people

The hard part is consumption through sales. Two hundred bills a day cannot be posted by hand. That is why the storeroom is normally wired into the POS: in VKassa, selling a dish deducts its ingredients via the recipe card automatically, deliveries and waste are logged separately, and during a stocktake the recorded and counted balances sit side by side.