Effective stock control

Effective stock control has one basic aim - to ensure you never run out of a particular item and will never have to utter those dreaded words: "I'm terribly sorry sir, the prawn cocktail's off".

Some pubs like to allow staff serving at tables to advise customers if any of the dishes on the menu are no longer available, while one or two still rely on the more traditional method of the chef bellowing from the kitchen to advise staff and customers alike when he has microwaved the last chicken kiev.

Whichever method you adopt, if you get to the stage where you've run out of a particular item, you need to know why it happened and do whatever you can to ensure it doesn't happen again. In fact, that's the basic aim of stock control.

With a good system in place you should know:

• what food you've sold
• what you have on hand
• what you have on order
• what you need to order
• when you need to order it.

Of course, there's inevitably a bit more to it than that. Preparing food depends on a number of variables, which are not always obvious. If your supplier delivers you smaller lettuces than usual, you can find yourself running out of salad earlier than expected. However, putting an efficient stock control system in place will go a long way towards ensuring that you never have to utter that dreaded phrase "I'm terribly sorry, sir, the prawn cocktail's off."

A proper stock control system takes a little time and effort to put in place, but the benefits can be well worth the effort. You may not realise how many sales you are losing each week until you put in place a system to prevent it happening.

Creating a stock list ​

The first thing you need to do is create a basic stock list, containing those items which you are going to need every day, all year round.

This should list the amount you need to have in stock, and the point at which you need to reorder. So, for those frozen chicken kievs, you need to know:

• how many you sell
• how often you want to order
• how quickly they arrive.

So, if you sell an average of three chicken kievs a day, and your supplier takes 48 hours to deliver, you need to place your order when you are down to your last six kievs.

How many you order depends on how often you order from that particular supplier. A weekly order will be seven days times three served, which equals a full stock of 21 frozen chicken kievs to find room for in the freezer.

Most of the major food wholesalers will deliver at least weekly, so for staple food items it is unlikely to be necessary to order more than a week's worth of stock.

This also helps to ensure you keep your cashflow under control, avoiding being invoiced for products which you may not sell for a month. It will also enable you to minimise the amount of space you need to allocate for storage.

Of course, frozen kievs are relatively easy. Working out how to set the stock levels for products which do not arrive as a single portion - for example, a tub of mayonnaise, or a bag of frozen onion rings - is more difficult.

While many outlets now create detailed menu manuals which specify how much of each ingredient to use when assembling a dish, it only takes a heavy-handed sandwich maker to throw the portion control out the window. There may need to be some trial and error in order to establish stock levels for some of these products.

Fresh food​

Fresh foods such as milk, bread, vegetables, meat and fish, create other difficulties when it comes to stock control.

While your system needs to be sharp enough to spur you into ordering items at very short notice from suppliers, not all those suppliers may have the systems in place to respond.

This is particularly relevant if you are using local suppliers for fresh produce, which is increasingly something pubs use as a way to market their menu, and as a means of ensuring that the offer is different to the national food chains.

For example, your local baker is more likely to be able to deal with a standing order for a set amount, rather than unpredictable orders for varying quantities. One solution might be to agree a daily order that changes through the week, say 200 fresh rolls on a Tuesday rising to 300 on Friday to cope with higher trade, and 600 on Saturday to take into account the fact that the baker doesn't deliver on Sunday.

Seasonal produce and chef's specials also create added difficulties because demand is less easy to assess.

Your best option is to buy quantities based your on experience of what sells well, and accept that you may be left with some stock if a dish does not prove as popular as expected.

To cope with all these variables you may want to have sub-categories within your stock control system to deal with ordering different categories including:

• staple items such as frozen meals
• long shelf-life products such as jars and tins
• short shelf-life products such as chilled foods
• staple fresh produce such as vegetables
• non-staple fresh produce such as seasonal dishes and specials
• non-food items such as napkins, linen, cutlery, china and glassware.

Electronic stock control​

If you're starting to think that stock control takes a great deal of effort, and that there must an easier way, then there is probably an EPoS salesman already on his way to talk to you.

There's no doubt that EPoS, or electronic point of sale, systems have taken a great deal of the hard work out of pub stock control.

The basic idea is that when a sale is recorded on a till, the EPoS system sends a message to the stock control system to let it know. When you come to place your order with suppliers, you should know exactly what is in stock, and what needs to be ordered. Some systems can be set up to compile orders automatically, and even send the order to the supplier, and update quantities when orders are delivered.

However, no system is foolproof, and it's not much use having a computer that tells you there's a week's worth of frozen chips in stock, if the freezer is actually empty when you open it. That could mean either:

• the full order wasn't delivered in the first place, or
• the chips are ending up somewhere other than on your customers' plates.

It makes sense to manually double-check stock levels before placing an order. You also need to check orders when they arrive - a written message on the delivery note saying that half the order has been delayed may not make it onto the computer, which will assume that everything is now in stock.

Electronic stock control is only a tool to help you, rather than a substitute for managing the business properly.