At a time when every expense your restaurant saves can give you critical leverage to innovate your menu, hire staff or invest in helpful technology, fine-tuning your approach to inventory management can help you identify and eliminate costly sources of waste. Tighten up your inventory management and you’ll waste less food, lower your cost of goods, manage and understand your vendor relationships better, avoid disappointing guests, and boost profits. This is a huge opportunity that so many restaurants are missing: According to the National Restaurant Association, the average restaurant wastes from 4-10 percent of the food they purchase. Beyond that, 53 percent of restaurants don’t track their waste (and the 47 percent that do vary widely in how they manage it). A large portion of food waste is due to spoilage, overstocking and other poor inventory practices. It’s easy for a small misstep to set an expensive domino effect in motion, so your efforts to keep your inventory organized, connected and stocked do pay off. Assess the health of your inventory management by scrutinizing the two sides of it — your team’s daily practices in moving and tracking items through your restaurant, along with your review of the reports about these items (and actions you take in response). A recent paper from Restaurant Finance Monitor outlines some best practices to follow on both sides of the inventory management process — and Team Four can advise you here too. How confident are you that waste isn’t lurking in your inventory?

From Pizza Hut, to One Table Restaurant Brands, to Red Lobster, there has been a lot of bankruptcy news in the restaurant industry of late. While it’s natural to see these cases as reflections of the ongoing challenges of doing business the industry in recent years, looking deeper reveals distinct problems within the brands that became unsurmountable for them. What can be helpful in these times is giving your restaurant a health check so you have time to make corrections before problems snowball. The restaurant accounting firm Cogneesol shared some tips operators can use to make sure they’re on the right track and not missing red flags that signal brewing problems. First, study your performance. If it’s poor, dig to find the reasons why. Is it about not sufficiently understanding your guests? Losing staff because of delays in paying them? Make decisions based not on gut instincts but on data- or experience-driven logic. Professionals in public relations, law, tax, finance, marketing, food safety, purchasing, training and maintenance can be helpful sounding boards and help you make more strategic decisions. Next, develop and maintain a good relationship with your bank manager by keeping them informed about your business on a regular basis. It can encourage their support and also make them aware when you might need a contingency plan against bankruptcy. Finally, make staff communication a priority – so they understand their value to you and are, in turn, willing to go the extra mile for you and deliver the kind of service that keeps guests coming back.