Are you ignoring your liquor costs?
Most merchants we’ve worked with in the food industry go through painstaking efforts to track every bun, every fry, every noodle, but fail to accurately record their liquor.
To be fair, we tend to see this trend happening more with restaurants rather than bars. It makes sense, but liquor can be just as expensive to lose as food.
Liquor is unfortunately, very easy to lose track of. Loss can come from bartenders not correctly ringing up drinks (or neglecting to ring up drinks at all), to over pouring shots.
Your POS system! Your POS system can support your business by tracking liquor for you, which will help in the unnecessary loss of liquor.
Train your bartenders to properly use your business’ point-of-sale system. Make sure they are ringing up every drink they pour and recording all double shots. Initially you may be met with some resistance with tracking from your employees, since it can get busy behind the bar, but give some incentives to track all drinks to ease the transition into tracking.
Some POS providers will run a monthly report for you, and catch patterns and discrepancies in your inventory.
Seriously, tell your bartenders they can give out a certain number of drinks at their own discretion. Just make sure the drinks they are recorded in your system. This will also bring a positive reaction with your customers (just don’t go overboard).
Have some regulars? Let your bartenders spoil them with an on-the-house drink just ring it up correctly.
Make sure your bar is organized and reset the bottles every time you close. This way you can get an idea of where your inventory stands just by a glance. Locking up liquor in a storage room can help minimize extra theft at the end of the night also.
If you only let managers have access to the liquor cabinet, you’ll be able to track which, if any bottles are missing from the storage room.
At the end of the every bartender's shift, have them bring all the empty bottles to a manager. The manager can then unlock the storage and restock the missing liquors, preventing too many employees with unlimited access to the liquor cabinet.
Tally up all the empty bottles and record them in your POS system, and track to see if you’re running short on bottles. That way you’ll know if there’s a discrepancy in how many bottles you were supposed to have that may be missing.
Talk to our POS experts, they’ve worked with restaurant and bar owners and can help make sure you’re not losing liquor.
