Restaurant inventory management checklist

Restaurant inventory is harder than retail inventory: you sell dishes but you buy ingredients, stock literally rots, and the gap between theoretical and actual food cost is where profit quietly leaves. This checklist is the working routine — daily, weekly, and monthly — that keeps that gap visible and small.

Set up once

• Build recipes: every menu item mapped to its ingredients and portions, so each sale depletes stock automatically.
• Set par levels and reorder points per ingredient, based on real usage and supplier lead times.
• Define storage areas (walk-in, freezer, dry store, bar) so counts happen where stock lives.
• Put receiving discipline in place: every delivery checked against the order — quantity, quality, price — before it is booked in.
• Log suppliers with their prices, so cost changes surface the week they happen, not at month end.

Daily

• Record waste as it happens — spoilage, prep waste, comps, mistakes — with a reason. Unlogged waste reappears as "unexplained" food cost.
• Book deliveries in on arrival, not at closing.
• Spot-check two or three high-value items (proteins, alcohol) against expected levels.

Weekly

• Cycle-count a rotating set of categories rather than the whole store.
• Review theoretical vs. actual usage: recipes say what should have been consumed; counts say what was. The variance is your waste, over-portioning, or shrinkage.
• Check expiry alerts and rotate or promote stock approaching its dates.
• Place supplier orders from reorder suggestions, not memory.

Monthly

• Full food-cost review per category and per dish — reprice or re-portion the outliers.
• Review supplier price drift and renegotiate or re-source where costs crept.
• Prune the menu's worst margin-and-volume performers; they consume inventory and prep time.

Tooling

On paper this routine takes hours a week; in a connected system most of it is automatic. DAXTOP's restaurant suite depletes ingredients per dish sold, tracks expiry, suggests orders, and reports theoretical-vs-actual variance per week — so the checklist becomes review-and-decide instead of count-and-calculate.