Restaurant Inventory & Product Management Spreadsheet
A Note About This Blog:
The following short blog is
written to explain the benefits of a new, comprehensive Excel
spreadsheet that we just made available for download. This program
uses the collection of key data to automatically generate actual food
costs, ideal food costs, recipe card price changes and product order
guides. On Monday, we will be posting a more general blog that once
again returns to our food cost control focus. In the meantime, if you
are an independent or regional food service operator that is not
currently able to execute these critical cost control practices, you
may find this free restaurant spreadsheet program and article useful.
In
the past two months, Food Buyers Network has published whitepapers
about various restaurant food cost control topics, such as yield
management, recipe costing, menu engineering, product specification
development, product usage variances and ideal food costs. While
executing these restaurant cost control practices takes focus and
commitment, they also require the processing and management of
operational data.
While all of the data required to execute food
cost control practices is readily available, many operators often
access this data during specific food cost control tasks, rather than
systematically processing it in a manner that makes it
available for multiple food cost control reports. One example of this
is the often neglected practice of recipe costing through the use of
standardized recipe cards that are updated frequently to ensure the
most current pricing. While most operators update their product prices
prior to executing a food inventory, as this is a critical best
practice to ensure the proper valuation of inventory, they do not
manage this process in a manner that enables them to simultaneously
update both their inventory product prices and their recipe card
prices. Rather, mangers spend twice the time necessary by updating prices in two
separate areas or, more likely, the practice of updating menu item
recipe prices gets forgotten.
Quite frankly, getting access to
many of the powerful food cost control reports can be achieved
relatively easy, if key data is entered in a single location. To help
independent and regional food service operators achieve this, we have
developed a free Excel program that you can download from our site. By
creating a series of spreadsheets that collect key operationaldata,
such as product prices, menu item recipes, menu item prices, on-hand
inventory figures and the menu item sales mix, restaurant managers are
then able to easily generate ideal food costs, actual food costs, order
guides and recipe cards in a systematic fashion. Of course, executing
this process still requires a time commitment, but by utilizing a single
program to process key operational data, it will become much easier and
more efficient to generate these reports.
You can download this restaurant spreadsheet on our site. There are instructions, but this program is still in BETA, so there may be some glitches. If so, please shoot us an email or give us a call so we can fix them and get out a new version. As always, we hope you find these tools helpful.
Download Spreadsheet Here