Do you really know what’s going on behind the bar? As a bar owner, it can be challenging to balance the management of food, beverage, labor, and overhead expenses and still keep an attentive eye behind the counter. Loss of control can mean loss of money. Proper bar management can help you stay in control, and help your business reap the rewards. Here are four things every bar owner should know about bar inventory to help grow your bottom line.
1. You Can’t Fix What You Never See
What’s the most popular drink on your menu? Does its pricing adequately reflect its pour cost? Is your staff accidentally over pouring your mixed drinks, or providing drinks on the house to their friends? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’ll never be able to identify and correct what’s eating into your profits. You need 20/20 visibility into your business, and that starts with proper management of bar inventory. Knowing what to count and how to count—not to mention making the process as efficient as possible—is vital to understanding your beer and alcohol usage. From there you can identify areas of waste and optimize your bar for best-selling products. You’ll free up valuable business cash and save yourself the headache of purchasing a “good deal” from your beverage rep on products that you can’t move quickly.
2. Counting Inventory Can Be Made Easier and More Accurate
We know that counting bar inventory manually tends to suck the life out of everything else you love about the bar management business. We also know the skeptic in you will probably roll your eyes at this next stat, but numbers don’t lie. Your bar could reduce your excess inventory by up to 48% with a bar inventory management solution. For example, BevSpot, designed specifically for the beverage industry, helps you count faster and more accurately making the process less grueling and the data more valuable. With mobile compatibility, simultaneous user input, auto calculations, and quick entry tools like touch-screen bottle slider for tenthing and input calculator, you’ll save time on the inventory and ordering process. With the data BevSpot provides, you’ll be able to make smarter ordering decisions related to the story the numbers tell.
3. Less Product Can Be Poured Down the Drain
There is a reason to cry over spilled liquor, and it’s when your product variance is over the industry standard of 20%. Without accurate and regular bar inventory counting, you won’t be able to understand your usage and identify what’s driving up beverage costs, whether that may be inaccurate pouring, poor pricing, or internal theft, so that you can make an informed plan to correct the problem.
4. You Can Charge More for that Drink
Really, you can! But without accurate inventory counts, you’ll never know which drink or how much. Pour cost is critical for the overall profitability of your bar, but you need viable data from your inventory counts to calculate the most profitable drink prices, and weed out what has been underpriced. There are drinks on your menu right now that you could be charging up to $1.50 more for, which could equate to thousands of dollars of revenue each month. In fact, on $500,000 in beverage sales, every 1% reduction in pour costs is an extra $5K in your pocket.
Taking control of your beverage program means starting with a solid foundation regarding your bar inventory management. Evergreen Point of Sale offers BevSpot’s cloud software for bars and restaurants, to help you stay in control of inventory management without the headaches. BevSpot helps automate beverage metrics so that you can spend more time making decisions that will benefit both your customers and your bottom line. Contact Evergreen Point of Sale today to learn how you can get started.