Wine inventory for restaurants...

[Graphix]

Looking at these restaurants out there that have bottle selections in the 1,000's and 10,000's. How are they maintaining their inventory? Between going over vintage changes, taking off 86'ed items, adding new inventory to the wine list, checking for discrepancies in sales vs inventory, making price updates in the POS system, reprinting the list, making sure waiters know whats getting low in numbers... theres got to be a better way to manage this?

I never feel like i have enough time to get this all done correctly. Any opinions? The restaurant i work for is using the older Micro's 2600 and its not tied to inventory at all just reports on what was sold. I work off of two excell sheets marking wines sold from the previous night and new inventory in. then a wine list sheet which i update daily. and print any pages which were changed.

thanks

B

[KatieLoeb]

You have to set up your own Excel spreadsheets and then plug in the numbers sold off the sales reports. Compare this to weekly inventories done on the morning after the close of your sales week, which would be Monday for most folks.

Excel, just like the POS systems, are only as smart as the person that programmed them. If you set up the equations in the columns to compare actual inventory vs. "expected inventory", you should be able to produce a variance report weekly that will show you where you have losses. Whether those losses are due to theft, overpouring or sloppy inventory counting is the forensics part of the job which comes next.