Ask any restaurant owner, bar proprietor, or FoH / BoH staff member what the least liked part of their profession is and more often than not you’ll get the same answer, taking inventory. Most managers and employees hate it and it’s no wonder why. Taking wine inventory sucks.
- It’s tedious. No one wants to go through the mundane task of counting every individual bottle in a wine cellar and handling the constant number revisions when tracking and receiving new shipments. This is only compounded considering product inventory is usually spread out over the floor of a business in storage spaces, on display cases, or hidden in the back of refrigerators. Most, 60% of restaurants, take inventory at the end of the month, but the remaining 40% do it bi-weekly and weekly to keep tight control over their inventory- so it’s 4x more time spent. Which brings us to our next point…
- It’s time-consuming. There isn’t a good way of counting units faster, even when counting by twos or entire cases, it increases the possibility of inaccuracies. By having employees count bottles one-by-one or two-by-two, it’s still costing you valuable hours in labor. These costs which may seem small month-to-month will translate to a significant margin of your yearly costs. Additionally, the person taking inventory is usually the highest pay grade employee (the GM, the Wine Director, etc.) So not only does taking inventory waste time, it’s wasting money.
- It’s tenuous (at best). With such a high likelihood for human error, even with dedicated team members, keeping inventory manually is unreliable. With multiple team members handling the task, mistakes will almost certainly be made. Lost or misplaced cases may be left out or double-counted. It also leaves potential for stolen units to be easily hidden in skewed numbers. All of this can lead to mis-ordered products and poor stocking, costing your business even more money.
Nonetheless, keeping an accurate inventory is still an essential part of managing a restaurant or bar.
But what if doing your wine inventory didn’t have to suck?! Here at InVine, we have a solution…
InVine’s digital platform gives you the ability to manage your beverage inventory instantly. In fact, InVine makes taking inventory 66% faster than normal making the platform one of the fastest tools in the industry. Additionally, with a simpler, more efficient process, inventory no longer has to be done solely by your highest pay grade employee. With our collaborative tool multiple employees can work on inventory at once.
InVine keeps accurate records of both bottle count and bin numbers. Changes are simple either through the iPad or iPhone app.
It will even notify you when you’ve sold out of a wine so you can immediately hide it from your menu in the middle of a dinner rush.
Our inventory app will record the order in which you count your products. This means the next time you go through the cellar, the products are sorted the way you see them.
Done with the counting? Click Export and upload the excel spreadsheet instantly to your accounting software.
InVine empowers restaurants and their teams to keep more accurate records, ultimately saving businesses from unnecessary labor and inventory costs. It also helps account for lost cases and bottles that “wander off.”