While spreadsheets and notebooks are helpful, they make for a tedious, time-consuming process that’s prone to errors. Automating the food costing process with specialized software is the way to go. It simplifies the overly complicated process to offer deep insights that lower your overheads and maximize profits. Dig in to learn more about the benefits of automating your food costing process with specialized software.
Complex to handle and costly to ignore, food costing is a delicate yet critical part of running a successful restaurant. Knowing the actual cost of every ingredient on your menu is vital to your bottom line. It informs your menu items, food prices, choice of suppliers, and more.
While spreadsheets and notebooks are helpful, they make for a tedious, time-consuming process that’s prone to errors. Automating the food costing process with specialized software is the way to go. It simplifies the overly complicated process to offer deep insights that lower your overheads and maximize profits.
Dig in to learn more about the benefits of automating your food costing process with specialized software.
Superior Inventory Control
Naturally, nobody expects you to rattle off your restaurant’s expenses from the top of your head. But what if you could? Thanks to food costing technology, you can access your entire inventory at the click of a button. You establish how much you pay for each ingredient and how it affects your bottom line.
Better yet, you can run the numbers from anywhere. The best food costing software is mobile-friendly to let you access your inventory while on the go.
Unlimited access to the inventory lets you calculate the cost of each meal on your menu costs. In markets where the cost of ingredients fluctuates a lot, food costing is a once-a-month affair. In more stable markets, you can do it once in three months. Regardless of the frequency, you should have an accurate figure.
Unlike notebooks and spreadsheets, a food costing solution eliminates any oversight. Your costing process accounts for the main ingredients, spices, condiments, and even the garnishes. A manual approach to this process is as tedious as it sounds, creating room for costly errors.
Detailed Pricing Analytics
Calculating prices is a staple in the business sector, and restaurants are no exception. Food costing apps lets you breeze through the food costing math while uncovering significant business insights. You can sort and set up proper categories for each item on the menu. You can even separate ingredients into categories such as recipes, locations, and mealtimes.
Once you’ve captured the data in a food costing solution, you can crunch the number and experiment with different pricing scenarios. Say, for instance, you pay $3 for a gallon of milk. If a new supplier promises to deliver at $2.50 a gallon, you can calculate the resultant cost savings per meal. At first glance, the cost savings might seem negligible but changing the context reveals compounding profits.
Detailed analytics will help you identify the ideal pricing points and maximize your profits. An automated process lets you experiment with various scenarios and pick the best solutions on minutes. Armed with this information, you can negotiate better prices with your suppliers or rethinking your ordering process to harness bulk discounts. Manual calculations would take too much effort and might not deliver credible results.
Cloud Storage
While helpful, notebooks and recipe books take up precious storage space, not to mention they’re susceptible to loss and damage. Storing boxes and cabinets brimming with old food costing reports is both risky and expensive. It’s also inefficient because it limits your ability to harness the power of historical data. Manually digging through old records is both tedious and time-consuming and hardly worth what you’re paying your employees.
A food costing app captures all your old records in an orderly fashion and keeps them handy. It powers your ability to access the data and carry out detailed analysis. You can search the data by item type, date, menu item, ingredients, and more. Suffice to say; you have all the answers at your fingertips.
Most food costing apps use cloud storage to keep your data accessible forever for anywhere. Having pricing data with you is handy when shopping in bulk. A quick tap and swipe unveil the old reports to give you real bargaining power if a supplier tries to charge you more. You can download the reports and store them for offline access.
Make Daata-Driven Decisions
There numerous moving parts in a restaurant and they might cloud your ability to make sound decision. Food costing solutions let you make data-backed management decisions.
Food and beverages take the lion’s share of a restaurant’s budget, but all items on your menu are created equal. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell your money makers from the slow movers? Or understand the ingredients that your target market thrives on?
Food costing software is also essential when creating new recipes for your eatery. You get to identify popular ingredients and build your new recipes around them. Since your clientele already loves the ingredients, they’ll be hard-pressed to try out the new menu items. And just like that, you’d have a cheap and efficient way to create popular menu items and delight your patrons.
With food costing software, you can easily track the cost of each ingredient in your walk-in freezer and how much money you paid for it. You can automatically adjust your food prices to reflect the change in ingredient costs. It also lets you exploit ingredient cost fluctuations and maximize your profits. If the price of an ingredient drops, you can put more of it on the menu and enjoy wider margins.
Standardize Your Recipes
A food costing app lets you create consistent and standardized recipes for your chefs. Sometimes chefs vary the amount of ingredients in dishes and unknowingly decrease your profit margins. If your best-selling sandwich uses 5 ounces of pork and a chef uses 8 ounces, they’ve driven you to incur a huge loss.
A food costing app lets you monitor and snuff out such practices. You can easily quantify the loss that results from deviating from the standard recipes. The cold, hard data makes a compelling argument when convincing skeptical chefs and employees.
On the flip side, you can use the portions to give your restaurant an edge on the market. Restaurants often reduce the quantities of expensive products on their menu to improve their margins. With food costing solution, you can identify innovative ways to maximize your margins without antagonizing your patrons. If anything, you can offer larger portions and create a large following of happy and satisfied customers.
Ditch the Spreadsheets and Notebooks
Automating your food costing process is much more than a fad. It allows you to simplify the food costing process while giving you a much-needed edge on the market. It powers your ability to make sound management decisions and create winning menus quickly and efficiently.
Feel free contact us to learn more about the advantages of using costing software.