Inventory Control Self-Audit - Identify Where You're Losing Margin

Restaurant cost control is a topic we’ve covered in some depth on these pages over the past five years or so. It is of course a core process and one that’s taken on ever greater importance recently. In today's unforgiving climate, cost control is an exercise in volatility management.

Ingredient and supplier prices are unpredictable while labour and energy costs remain high. To make matters worse, the ability to pass them on to the customer is far more limited due to elevated price sensitivity and tighter competition.

Protecting margins through periodic pricing adjustments is no longer enough. It’s now about maintaining a vice-like grip on day-to-day operations, ensuring that core processes are executed consistently. Nowhere is this more important than in a restaurant’s inventory. 

Your inventory is likely the biggest source of hidden variance, whether through poor stock rotation, inaccurate counts or unrecorded waste. For most restaurants, it's an operational area from which discrepancies most commonly emerge.

And if left unaddressed, any gaps or inefficiencies will compound over time, leading to significant financial loss. 

To identify inefficiencies, the most obvious thing to do is conduct a self-audit. Even a basic appraisal of your current practices will help to highlight where control is slipping and where corrective action is needed.

With this in mind, we’ve created the following inventory management checklist. It’s structured around the key operational areas where issues typically occur, so you can quickly identify gaps and take corrective action.

Inventory Management Checklist