If a bar has a great concept it doesn’t guarantee it is performing good financially. Many amazing bars were shut down because their owners cared more about creativity and originality of the place rather than boring numbers. If you don’t want to get into one of the common operational pitfalls, that can send a great pub down the pass – like product variance, inaccurate inventory, wrong pricing policy, some technology may come in handy. POS and inventory management system for bars and pubs can help overcome challenges.
Ease tedious inventory work
Lots of bar owners have the same nightmare: an endless storeroom with hundreds of liquor bottles and only pen and paper in their hands… Dreadful! Dealing with inventory manually is probably the worst thing about running a pub. But no worries, there’s an inventory management solution, that will not only ease the routine, but also help you to reduce the surplus items and make sure your best-selling liquors are always in stock.
By the way, do you know what’s the most popular drink in your menu? Most bar owners who don’t use a pub POS system, like Poster, are not aware of that. They might have some guesses, but don’t know for sure. And the correct answer might come as surprise for them. If you have no clue about your best-selling and sitting liquors, you might be losing quite a lot of money because of the inadequate pricing.
Build a profitable beverage program
Understanding your beer and alcohol usage is a key point to optimizing your product portfolio. You can free up some valuable cash to purchase the best-selling items rather than buying the liquors that won’t bring you profits that fast.
Besides, the best way to make your bar more profitable is to control the pour cost. This, by the way, is an impossible thing to do without the good-old-inventory we were talking about. In case you need some help in calculating the pour cost, here’s a tip for you: divide your inventory usage by your sales and multiply by 100 to get the percentage. That’s what your bar gets from each drink. Knowing the pour cost will help you to increase the price for popular products and timely update your drink prices in future.
Ensure every drink served is paid
Are you sure that your bar staff doesn’t provide drinks on house to their friends? Do you know how many visitors leave the bar not paying? Or maybe you are losing money on product variance? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’ll hardly be able to identify what’s eating your profits.
A pub POS system will help you to make sure that every drink in your bar is paid. Many of them have special options like fastening orders to payments, simultaneous user input, auto calculations, and quick entry tools like touch-screen bottle slider for tenthing and input calculator that will ease both bartender’s work and inventory process.
Another important thing that a POS software can help you take care of is product variance. Did you know that the industry standard of shrinking is about 20%? If have more, it seems like your business is in trouble. But you can solve the problem easily if just figure out the reasons that caused to it: it could be inaccurate pouring, bartender’s giveaways to friends or even theft.
Staying in control of your inventory management with a help of a pub POS system will give your bar a solid foundation for development and prosperity as well as give you more free time to make changes that both you and your customers will benefit from.
