Introducing Lightspeed Inventory: The Stock Management Tool You Never Knew You Needed

There’s one thing that every venue has in common. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a tiny, hole-in-the-wall takeaway joint or a book-a-year-in-advance fine dining institution, you all need something to sell, otherwise what’s the point?

I’m talking, of course, about inventory.

Without your inventory your meals would have no ingredients. There would be no packaging to serve your takeaways in and your bar would be very dry indeed.

Inventory is just about the most important part of your business, so shouldn’t it be something that is managed with a little care and an attention to detail?

Introducing Lightspeed Inventory.

Lightspeed Inventory is a new product which makes controlling your inventory a one-stop shop. Read on to see how Lightspeed Inventory can help you:

• Control your margins
• Maximise staff efficiency
• Automate inventory management
• Reduce spoilage and food waste
• Save time and money

Control your margins

It’s important for a restaurant to know their COGS and their margins in order to know not only how to price their menu properly, but also which menu items make the most profit for them.

With Lightspeed Inventory, you can track these metrics all the way through the menu writing process, from thinking up a new menu item, through to pricing the individual ingredients, creating recipe instructions and even a suggested menu price.

Why is it important to know all of these things? Glad you asked.

We can all write menu items full of our dream ingredients, the sum of their parts making up a dish fit for a king. The only problem here is that royalty has expensive tastes and your new menu item will either have to be costed prohibitively, or have the potential to bleed profits due to expensive ingredients.

Knowing how much each ingredient will cost as you’re creating your recipes lets you see if an item needs to be tweaked in order to hit a sweet spot where it’s still a great product and it’s worthwhile financially for both you and your customers. It will even suggest how much to sell it for.

Whilst building your recipe, you can set the exact quantities needed so that you can see exactly how much each ingredient costs you per order, and you can even include instructions on how to make it so that your menu is consistent, regardless of who is making it. 

Maximise staff efficiency

Excluding the larger end of the hospitality scale, none of us hires staff with the intention of tying them to a role where their time is taken up by sifting through invoices and spreadsheets in the hopes of finding the most profitable version of your business.

Instead, we hire teams of floor staff, bartenders, chefs and line cooks who will occasionally moonlight in an admin role out of necessity and, let’s face it, they might not be fully trained to undertake these tasks in a way that best serves the business.

With Lightspeed Inventory, the admin work is taken care of for you. 

Stock levels are automatically updated as it’s received and as it’s sold, meaning tedious manual stock takes are a relic of the past. The same goes for reporting, with easily accessed monthly stock and wastage reporting.

In short, your staff’s time is freed up to spend it where it matters most: on the customers.

Automated inventory management

Let’s talk a little more about managing your inventory.

It is, traditionally, an arduous task and one that is littered with potential pitfalls that could throw off your entire inventory management system.

All it takes is a miscount here, an unreported spoilage there, or something as simple as not ordering as much as you need and suddenly you’re running out of stock mid-service, even though all of the data you’ve got at hand tells you you’re safe.

Thankfully, these issues have been addressed.

Lightspeed Inventory updates in real-time, letting you know exactly how much stock you have on-hand, adjusting as you trade. Once your stock begins to get low, it will alert you so that you’ll never miss an order.

As for food waste and spoilage? You can easily log and track it so that you can trade in confidence that the stock levels you’ve got on your screen are as accurate as they can possibly get.

Reduce spoilage and food waste

And it’s important to keep track of your wastage and spoilage because it can be somewhat of a silent killer for a restaurant or bar.

As you know, ingredients cost money, regardless of whether they make it to the customer or not, and an ingredient that is lost to spoilage or wastage is, essentially, money down the drain. This money has a tendency to add up if you don’t keep track of it properly, and spoilage and food waste has the potential to be one of the areas of inventory management that can get overlooked, swept under the rug in favour of more obvious metrics for tracking costs, like price.

I know it can be an innocent mistake too. Perhaps ingredients were bought for a menu item that just won’t sell and the stock is wasted as it sits in the cool room waiting to be cooked. Other times it might just be an ingredient bought in too high a quantity and the opportunity to use it all escapes you as time marches ever forwards.

This all affects your COGS, just as much as the price.

With Lightspeed Inventory’s spoilage and food waste tracking, you can minimise the impact that spoilage and wastage has on your COGS because the real-time reporting does a lot of the work for you.

As spoilage or food waste is logged, your inventory will be updated in real-time and it will show in your reporting that it was lost to this and not sold. Over time you can gain a clearer perspective on which items are prone to wastage and take the required steps to lower their impact on your COGS.

Save time and money

Lowering your COGS is (possibly) the best way to save you money, but not everybody knows how to go about doing it.

A lot of places can become wedded to a particular menu item and, over time, the ingredients that go into its preparation can fluctuate in price for a number of reasons like seasonality or supply chain issues. This, in turn, raises the COGS and without the proper supervision it could spiral out of control, lowering your margins and losing you money.

Aren’t you happy there’s a new product available that can help you with this?

The real-time reporting with Lightspeed Inventory actually shows you which items in your inventory are costing you the most by recording the cost of an item when sold and tracking its actual gross profit. It also has average cost price updates so that you can track your menu’s COGS more accurately.

You can house your supplier’s details all with your system so that you not only know what to order and when, but who to order it from, creating, sending and receiving orders from your suppliers from one, central location. And because you have this capability, it makes delegating the ordering process safer as you can be confident that the correct items will be ordered from the correct suppliers.

No more manual emails, texts or phone calls.

Introducing Lightspeed Inventory

Inventory management is as much the backbone of a business as its staff and it deserves to be managed in the best way possible.

Lightspeed Inventory helps you streamline and automate your inventory management by intuitively integrating with your existing Lightspeed Restaurant platform. 

With Lightspeed Inventory, you can monitor stock and ingredients levels in real-time, track wastage, create recipes, order and receive products from suppliers and analyse your profitability. And you can do it all from one platform.

See how Lightspeed Inventory can help your business manage its inventory better. Talk to an expert today.