Inventory control: stopping leakage before it reaches the P&L

Nobody empties a restaurant store room in one go. Leakage happens by the gram: a slightly heavier portion, a case that was never weighed on delivery, an item that expired at the back of a shelf, an order cancelled and never logged. At month end the number arrives in aggregate, and nobody can say where it came from.

Inventory control is not about being hard on staff. It is simply knowing what came in, what went out, and what is left.

1. Purchasing is a decision, not a habit

Most restaurants order “the same as last week”. That habit is the first source of dead stock.

Tie the order to actual consumption:

order qty = (average daily usage × days of cover) + safety stock − stock on hand

And put an approval step on purchase orders. Once everything above a threshold needs a manager, an entire category of purchases nobody can explain simply disappears.

2. Receiving: the most important five minutes of the day

This is where you win or lose more than you think. The rule is short:

Nothing enters the store until it has been weighed and matched against the purchase order.

A goods-received note must separate three quantities:

Without that split, every shortfall silently becomes “stocktake variance” at month end and belongs to nobody.

3. Counting: weekly and monthly

A monthly full count is not enough — you discover the problem thirty days after it happened.

Use a simple split:

• Weekly: high-value lines — meat, fish, cheese, oil, drinks. Usually twenty to thirty items carrying about 80% of stock value.
• Monthly: everything else.

Fix the conditions: same day, same hour, after close and before deliveries, and two people — one counting, one recording.

4. Batches and expiry dates

Batch and lot tracking is not a luxury in food:

• It enforces FIFO instead of the cook reaching for the nearest case.
• It warns you before expiry, while you can still act.
• It makes a recall precise: which batch, which supplier, which delivery date.

5. Waste: log it to manage it

Unlogged waste is not less waste. It is waste you cannot see.

Make logging fast for staff, with clear reasons:

• Spoilage / expiry
• Preparation error
• Customer return
• Staff meals

After one month you will have a ranked list of causes, and you will find that a single cause is half the number — usually fixable by changing a procedure rather than a person.

6. Reorder points

Running out during service costs you twice: the lost sale, and a customer who will not rush back.

reorder point = average daily usage × supplier lead time + safety stock

At 12 kg of chicken a day, a two-day lead time and one safety day:

12 × 2 + 12 = 36 kg

Set the alert at 36 kg, not at “when it looks low”.

What this looks like in one system

The difference between a restaurant that controls stock and one that chases it is that deductions happen live and by themselves.

In GoSufra, inventory is wired to recipes and to the POS: every sale deducts its ingredients from the branch’s stock, purchase orders and goods-received notes add to it, stocktakes correct it, and the waste log explains the difference. Low-stock and expiry alerts arrive before they become an incident.

And every movement carries an audit trail — who changed it, when, and by how much.

A weekly checklist

1. Was every delivery weighed this week?
2. Was every high-value line counted?
3. What are the three largest variances, and what explains them?
4. What was the top waste reason?
5. How many items ran out during service?
6. Is anything expiring within seven days?

Six questions, ten minutes a week. That is the distance between stock you manage and stock that manages you.