What is the best inventory management software?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best inventory management software for your business will depend on a number of factors, including the size and nature of your business, your budget, and your specific needs. However, some popular inventory management software options include Stockpile, Zip Bartender, Merchandise Management System (MMS), and InventoryLab.
How to Find the Best Inventory Management Software For Your Business
What is Bar Inventory Management?
Bar inventory management involves the tracking and restocking of all non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages, mixers, garnishes, and sodas at a bar. Keeping track of all the equipment needed to operate the bar, including utensils, airlocks, refrigerators, carboys, and so on, is another aspect of bar inventory management.
Regular inventory counts are necessary to ensure that perishables are not overstocked, and to prevent bar employees from overpouring or giving out free liquor.
Poor inventory management will spell doom for your business. If you don't have adequate alcohol supplies on hand, you will lose sales opportunities and upset your customers by failing to fulfill their requests. On the other side, cluttered and overstocked shelves will take up storage space unnecessarily and waste resources.
So, it's important to always keep only the required quantity of stocks on hand and to know when to issue purchase orders. Every decision you make regarding your bar inventory needs to be supported by data and should be aimed at maximizing profits.
How is Bar Inventory Typically Done?
Bar inventory counts were traditionally done using manual methods like counting items by hand, recording stock counts on paper, and telephoning or emailing suppliers for fresh stocks.
When manual methods are used, it's likely that stock-take may be comprised by human error. Moreover, if the inventory is large, managers may find it difficult to complete the job alone. They must depend on their employees, and the more employees there are, the greater the loss of labor hours and higher the labor costs. The time-consuming and labor-intensive nature of the process is another drawback of the manual method.
Stock-taking can also be done with the help of simple spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are inexpensive and easy to use, making them perfect for small businesses with modest requirements and tight budgets.
Spreadsheets are, however, also prone to mistakes and are difficult to audit and update. Additionally, they have a limited range of functions, are hard to scale, and cannot receive real time updates.
Cloud-based inventory solutions, on the other contrary, are able to address the majority of these problems. Spreadsheets are simply saved locally on computers, while modern inventory systems are hosted on external servers.
Monitoring Inventory Turnover Regularly: Inventory turnover should be monitored weekly. This is supported by a report from Apicbase, an F&B management platform. According to the survey, firms can increase their bottom line by up to 10% by measuring inventory turnover on a weekly basis. In this context, inventory turnover describes how frequently inventory is sold or used over a given time frame.
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What is Bar Inventory Software?
Bar inventory software is essentially a computer program that helps automate inventory management. Using bar inventory software, bar owners and operators can keep an eye on inventory levels and place orders right away when supplies go down. By calculating the correct number of items required for effective production, intelligent software helps prevent excessive and superfluous buying and the consequent wastage of resources.
Bar inventory software allows real-time reviews of inventory levels on any handheld device like a tablet or smartphone, enabling business owners to take prompt action when needed.
Inventory software also relies on barcode scanners that in turn help streamline and accelerate stock-taking, and reduce the labor-intensiveness of the process. Products can even be counted with the aid of voice search technology.
Moreover, smart inventory solutions can be effortlessly integrated with other systems of business management, including point of sale (POS), demand planning, supply chain management, and customer relationship management systems, to offer an organization all-round benefits.
Businesses in the food and beverage sector can use inventory data to determine products and menu offerings, plan product purchase, manage purchase orders and suppliers, and select outlets for greater investment.
Furthermore, businesses can track stock information at any convenient time and on the fly, thanks to cloud based software solutions. Data can be viewed on any mobile device and by multiple users at the same time.
Inventorying with the help of sophisticated software is, therefore, far better than manual or spreadsheet inventory.
Parts of an Automated Inventory System
An automated inventory system consists of hardware and software.
Hardware-
Hardware for a barcode inventory system includes printers, mobile devices, and computer terminals, and barcode scanners.
Barcode-based systems automate stock counts and collect and record inventory data accurately.
Barcodes, in this regard, are numeric or alphanumeric characters, marked by alternating black and white lines, or they could be a collection of patterns. Patterned, two-dimensional codes are commonly known as QR codes. Barcodes and QR codes pack a large amount of product information into a small, compressed space, and scanning them unlocks the data they contain.
A printer is used to produce barcode labels for products. Labels are pasted on the product and act as an identity card. A barcode scanner throws light on a barcode and captures the light reflected back to make sense of the coded information. This data is then translated into corresponding text by the barcode decoder and presented in plain text on the computer/mobile screen.
A barcode scanner can be connected to a computer terminal through wires, or it can work wirelessly on Wifi, Bluetooth, or mobile broadband technologies. In the case of wireless scanners, supporting hardware like Wifi/Bluetooth devices can be counted as inventory system hardware.
Software-
Inventory software typically takes the shape of a mobile app. Unlike websites, apps can function without an internet connection or browser. They also load quicker than web pages, making the app experience better. They can be downloaded and saved easily on mobiles, and function in the same way they do on laptops and desktops.
The best inventory management programs today are cloud based. As touched upon in the preceding section, these allow data access at any time, from anywhere, and by any number of users simultaneously. Also, updates can be viewed in real time.
Inventory mobile apps allow smartphones to be transformed into barcode scanners, with the mobile camera used to scan barcodes/QR codes, and the inventory software on the app displaying the decoded information on the screen.
Automated Vs. Manual Inventory
1. Automated software that monitors inventory in real time tells businesses when they have run out of key ingredients. They will now never have to turn a customer down, saying they don't have what it takes to make a dish. Manual methods, on the other hand, may not be able to identify stock depletion accurately and in advance every time, which can lead to stock-outs and customer complaints.
2. In order to be profitable, any F&B company must keep a tight rein on its spending on food and beverages. Robust inventory and supply chain management can reduce overpurchasing, resource wastage, and offset increasing costs. With effective inventory as well as supply chain management solutions, the discrepancy between actual and expected consumption of ingredients can be reduced. Manual methods may not provide a clear picture of this.
3. Employing a strong inventory management approach, businesses can balance demand and supply. By ensuring an optimum supply of ingredients, bars and restaurants can minimize wastage and use fresh ingredients every time. Manual methods are often not able to make order management so efficient.
4. Sophisticated inventory management software provides vital sales data and helps organizations understand how their demand and supply dynamics function. It helps improve decision making by enabling businesses to accurately estimate sales patterns. By determining inventory turnover rate, modern software solutions can help discover opportunities to lower inventory carrying costs. It's extremely challenging to do all this with the help of manual methods alone.
5. Advanced inventory software solutions support the upkeep of a comprehensive inventory checklist as well as the documenting of recipes. This guarantees consistent quality of food and limits resource waste. Manual methods, on the other hand, are not as fleet-footed and can't be used to do complex tasks such as recipe documentation.
How to Find the Best Inventory Management Software For Your Bar
There are several considerations that you have to take into account while purchasing a software solution for your bar. What constitutes the right software depends upon the size of your business and its specific needs.
Large businesses require highly sophisticated inventory solutions since their inventories are more complicated. A small pub, on the other hand, may just be focusing on a few types of beverages and ingredients, would be operating on a limited scale and may have a small customer base. Such a business can do without a slew of add-ons in its inventory management software and operate instead with basic versions. So for instance, a small business may not need multi-warehouse management features, waste tracking, and support only a few users.
Lesser number of features would also mean that you won't have to shell to too much for the software. Pricing is indeed one of the major considerations for small businesses and startups, which may not exactly be flush with funds.
However, there may a certain set of features that you can't simply do without. For instance, every business, whether it is big, medium or small, can do with the support of detailed business intelligence reports and data analytics, which help organizations to take more prudent decisions. The best software is one that provides all the necessary features to do good business at an affordable price even if at a modest scale.
Your choice of inventory management software would, moreover, depend on the kind of integrations that are on offer. The best inventory solutions communicate ad coordinate closely with other systems of bar and restaurant management like the point of sale (POS) system, customer relationship management system, supply chain management system. You also need to ensure that your inventory software can connect with an efficient barcode scanner, which would make stock-taking a cinch.
Furthermore, if you can afford, you would want your software to manage multiple sales channels. Sophisticated inventory systems offer integrations with multiple sales platforms like Lazada, Shopify, Amazon, etc.
Your Inventory Management software should also ideally becloud based, especially if you need to monitor your inventory on the go, at different times, and need several users to access inventory data all at once. Using Data becomes easy with the help of a high-quality software.
Additionally, a software solution provider with a strong tradition of after-sales assistance and training would be highly preferred.
Bar Management FAQs
1. What are some of the general duties that a bar manager has to carry out?
A. A bar manager has several duties. They have to promote the company; manage liquor licenses; hire and train kitchen workers, servers, and bartenders; create employee work schedules; make sure that clients get top-notch service and the best quality food and drink; address customer grievances; manage inventory and expenditures; and manage budgets and cash flow.
2. How do you choose the right alcohol distributors?
A. Factor in delivery costs when choosing alcohol distributors. Choose distributors who offer extra services. Some keg distributors, for example, clean taps at no extra charge. Ensure that the delivery schedule offered by the distributor suits your needs. Lastly, take into account distributor rates. For instance, some distributors lower the price for bulk orders.
3. Why is it important to keep the menu updated and fresh?
A. Your menu will have items that are popular with customers. To keep the dining experience interesting for your regular clients and to persuade new customers to keep revisiting, it's crucial to mix things up a bit and introduce new menu items. A bar can do this seasonally by offering trendy beverages, for example.
4. Why is important to maintain a well-stocked bar?
A. Telling customers you have no supplies left of their preferred drink, especially if a liquor brand is well-known, is one of the worst things you can do to your business prospects. Your bar will always be fully stocked if you conduct inventory consistently and communicate with your suppliers regularly.
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