New Features & Updates - May 2021
It's been an exciting few months around DigiChef HQ! We've been hard at work behind the scenes updating the application, and are very happy to announce our newest core feature: Geographical Inventory Management!
DigiChef now provides you the ability to create, count and compare inventory levels anywhere and everywhere in your organization, all from your mobile devices! Gone are the days of printing out spreadsheets and manually (scribbling) writing down quantities before transferring back to the spreadsheet. To cut down on potential error entry points, we've made the process entirely digital!
We've also made a few other exciting updates, including an improvement to Prep Recipes that we think you're going to love!
Inventory Overview
Conducting a regularly-scheduled inventory count is a key performance enhancement tool that aids in the overall profitability of your restaurant. It's not only imperative to know the precise dollar value of products that are waiting to be turned into revenue but you need to know which categories of products are contributing to variances to boost your purchasing efficiency.
Do I need to count inventory?
Do you need to? No. Should you? Absolutely. I know that a lot of operators are content with achieving a consistent raw food cost and there is nothing wrong with that! However, you should never want to leave any money potentially left on the table when possible and conducting inventory counts allows you to determine your Actual Food Cost. You can read up more about the differences between Raw and Actual Food Costs by checking out our other article.
Having an consistent idea of the products on hand and their associated values is a lot easier to understand than you might think! You can view inventory counts as the proverbial "Canary in the Coal Mine". Sales trending down but inventory levels getting higher? You're probably overspending and potentially wasting products.
How often should I count inventory?
The answer is "it depends". It needs to make sense for your operations in terms of ROI. The two typical counting periods are either weekly or monthly.
Obviously, the more frequent the counting periods the higher success rate you will have with catching purchasing anomalies (who ordered this thing?) and stockpiles of products that could potentially go bad. That said, labour is a real crunch in the world of COVID. If you can only count once per month then it's better than not counting at all.
As always, for the regular reader a common theme amongst these posts is that you must be consistent to extract the most valuable data from these counts. If you're going to count monthly, make sure you always count on the 1st consistently each month. Weekly? Always count on a Monday, for example. Staying consistent allows you to accurately monitor the ending categorical variances (more on that below).
How does a geographical inventory compare to a regular inventory?
I'm glad you asked! Typically, inventory count sheets are either manually made by someone listing all of your products in a spreadsheet or by exporting them from your primary vendor supplier (think: Sysco, GFS, etc.). While those are great, they are typically assembled by Category of product.
E.g., You have one tab that is titled "Produce", another titled "Dairy", etc. If you're lucky, these are organized alphabetically and contain the product name, brand and a product description.
Some of the drawbacks to that, of course, is that you can have the same product that lives in multiple locations around your restaurant. Imagine trying to shove that 24 CT box of iceberg in the line cooler; it's not going to be pretty. This leads to a ton of page flipping, scribbling down beside your original number and trying to do some quick mental math. As mentioned above, this introduces a ton of potential error points in your counting and can really skew your ending figures.
With a Geographical Inventory Count, you tell us where you're counting and what products you're looking at in that zone. You just move from location to location in your restaurant and count what you see where you see it. Leave the hard work of matching up all of the product values to us! This is an incredible speed boost and mitigates a ton of manual data entry issues!
Getting started with inventories
You can get started with this new feature by clicking on Products in the sidebar and selecting Inventories.
- Start by creating Zones in your restaurant, such as "Walk-in Cooler" or "Dry Storage".
- You can create as many Zones as you can handle - so feel free to get as global or granular as you wish!
- Once your Zones are established, simply:
- Create and open a new count,
- Select the Zone you are currently counting, then
- Start adding items and their quantity to the zone
DigiChef will automatically highlight all of the product values by total, by category (Produce, Dairy, etc.) and by zone for that specific count. Easily see where all of your product is living in your restaurant by checking out the individual count pages!
On a more global scale, the main Inventory page plots the ending value for both the total and the total food of each inventory count in an easy to understand chart and table. Keeping tabs on your inventory trends has never been so easy!
However, we didn't stop there! DigiChef also has the ability to instantly compare two inventory counts to determine the variances, if any, for each category of product.
Click the "Compare" button on any two inventory counts and DigiChef will generate a variances report for you to view and analyze!
Changes to Prep Recipes
We've been calling the newest of ability of our Prep Recipes "Prepception" around the office. We're beyond excited to announce that you can now consume a Prep Recipe in another Prep Recipe in another Prep Recipe in another... well.. you get the idea.
E.g. You want to make a Pesto Hollandaise.
- Start by building your Prep Recipe for Pesto
- Create and build your Prep Recipe for Hollandaise
- Then, create a new Prep Recipe and use both the Pesto and the Hollandaise recipes together to create a new, fully costed sauce!
This new "Pesto Hollandaise" can then be used on any number of menu items, and as with all other DigiChef recipes, the pricing is always kept up-to-date automatically for you.
UI/UX Highlighted Changes
- The Invoices link has been moved under the Suppliers tab on the sidebar.
- When manually adding Products to an invoice, DigiChef now prevents you from incorrectly recording an item by case if it was previously recorded as being sold by weight (and vice versa).
- We've added a table to the Food Costing page to better track the historical food costing at your location.
- We've updated the charts on both the Recipes and Prep Recipes pages to allow you to view the last 30 days (default behaviour) or the last 12 months.
- We've added additional data to the individual Product pages, such as Last Purchased Unit of Measure, $ per Unit of Measure as well as listing all of the Recipes and Prep Recipes that product is being consumed in (and by what quantity).
All the feedback!
Your feedback helps us prioritize development of new features and updates to the platform. See something new that you love? Something that could be improved upon? A key feature that you feel would help your business?
We want to hear from you!
Send us an email at support@digichef.co