Restaurant inventory management
- Variance in units (negative is a shortfall)
- -86
- What the shortfall cost you to replace
- $1,075
- Count accuracy, percent of expected found
- 96.4
The arithmetic on these sheets is your own count: units, unit cost and reorder point in, variance and value out. Nothing is estimated and no industry average is applied to your numbers. Where a page states an outside figure it names the document it came from and links to it.
A restaurant counts three things that behave nothing alike. Food spoils, so the count is about what you will still be able to sell on Friday. Liquor does not spoil but walks, so the count is about the gap between what the tills rang and what the bottles say. Smallwares neither spoil nor sell, so the count is about replacing what broke before service notices. Most independents run one sheet for all three and then wonder why the number never agrees with anything. Split them, count each on the rhythm it deserves, and the arithmetic starts telling you where the money actually goes.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Count food to the next delivery, not to the month
Your food count exists to answer one question: will this get you to the next delivery without a stockout or a bin full of waste? That makes the useful cycle the delivery cycle. A kitchen taking three deliveries a week counts the high-turn lines before each one and the slow lines once a month, which is a twenty minute job rather than a Sunday night. The corollary is that your count sheet should be ordered by the walk, not alphabetically: walk-in first, then dry store, then bar, in the order a person physically moves. A sheet ordered the way the supplier's invoice is ordered doubles the time the count takes and guarantees lines get missed.
Count liquor against the till, not against itself
A liquor count is only worth doing next to sales. Take opening stock plus deliveries, subtract closing stock, and you have poured units; price those at your own cost and compare with what the till took at your own menu price. The gap is over-pouring, comps nobody recorded, or theft, and it is the only one of the three counts where the variance has a name. Record the comps and the staff drinks separately before you look at the variance, because otherwise they show up as shrinkage and the conversation starts in the wrong place. A bar that records them properly usually finds the remaining gap is small and specific.
Price the variance at what you pay, not what you charge
Enter your cost per unit, not the menu price. A 40 unit shortfall on a line that costs you $2.10 is $84 to replace and that is the figure worth chasing; the same shortfall at the menu price reads as $360 of lost revenue, which is a different and much less actionable number.
Set par as a level, then let the sheet tell you when you are under
Par is the level below which you reorder, and on this site it is entered as a share of expected rather than a fixed number so it survives a busy week. A line expecting 480 units with par set at 25 sits at 120; walk out at 96 and the sheet says you are 24 under, before the section head says it at 6pm on Saturday.
Do the same count twice before you trust the number
The first count of a new sheet is always wrong somewhere: a case counted as a unit, a keg counted full, a prep item counted raw and cooked. Run it twice a week apart and look at what moved absurdly. The second count is where a restaurant's inventory management stops being a chore and starts being a control. It is also worth having two different people do the first two counts of the same shelf. Where they disagree is almost always a line whose unit is ambiguous, and fixing those definitions is worth more to the number than any amount of extra frequency.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
How often should a single restaurant count stock? Food weekly on the high-turn lines and monthly on the rest; liquor weekly if it is a serious part of the revenue, monthly if it is a shelf behind the till; smallwares quarterly. The frequency matters less than the day: the same day each week, before a delivery, with the same person walking the same route.
Should the count happen before or after a delivery? Before, every time. Counting after a delivery measures the delivery, not the week, and the figure you actually want is what service consumed. If the delivery lands during the count, stage it somewhere the count has already passed and add it afterwards.
What is a normal variance for a restaurant? There is no honest industry number to give you here, because a bar pouring cocktails and a pizzeria have nothing in common on this. What is true for both is that the first count establishes your own baseline and the second tells you whether it is stable. Chase the direction, not somebody else's benchmark.
Does inventory affect what I owe at tax time? It can. The IRS guidance on accounting periods and methods sets out when a business has to account for inventories and how it values them, and a food business that has never valued its stock properly is usually guessing at cost of goods sold. Count first, then take the figure to whoever does your return.
Do I need a system, or will a sheet do? A sheet does the arithmetic and a system keeps the history. If you are counting to fix a variance you can see this month, the sheet is enough. If you want to know whether the variance is shrinking over a year, across two sites and three managers, that is what the record is for. The middle path most independents land on is a sheet for the weekly food count, where speed is everything, and a record for the monthly liquor and smallwares count, where the history is what you are after.
Will the Restaurant inventory management fit what you count?
Tell us what you are counting and how you count it today, and we will tell you whether Stocktaka fits before you pay for anything.