How Do You Track Stock and Recipes in a Restaurant?

Why doesn't a notebook work?

Restaurant stock doesn't run down by the unit like in a grocery store — it runs down by the gram. When a latte is sold, what disappears from the shelf isn't “1 latte”; it's 18 grams of beans and 200 milliliters of milk. If stock isn't tracked at this level of detail, the count won't match at the end of the month, and no one can tell who or what caused the shortfall.

The right method: recipe-based stock tracking

Every product has a recipe listing how much of each ingredient it uses. When a sale is made, the system checks the recipe and deducts the ingredients from stock by the gram. That way:

• Stock goes down by itself; no manual entry is needed
• You get a low-stock alert before an ingredient runs out
• Stock counts reveal the real discrepancy — a discrepancy means a loss, and its cause gets investigated

Account for waste

Onions shrink when peeled, meat shrinks when cooked, and some milk is left over when it's frothed. This is called waste. In a good system, a separate waste percentage is entered for each ingredient in the recipe; stock deductions and costs are calculated including waste. If waste is ignored, stock always “looks higher” than it really is.

Options should be tied to recipes too

When a customer chooses almond milk, almond milk should be deducted, not cow's milk. When a double shot is selected, twice the coffee beans should be deducted. Single-recipe systems can't track these differences; at the end of the month, both the stock and cost reports are wrong. In Orderly, every option is a recipe rule: which ingredient comes out, which goes in, and how many grams — all defined.

The only practical way to keep costs up to date

With ingredient prices constantly changing, updating costs by hand isn't sustainable. The practical approach is this: enter the purchase invoice into the system and let the system do the rest. In Orderly, entering an invoice creates three records at once: the expense is recorded, stock goes up, and the unit cost is recalculated using the weighted average. The cost of every recipe that uses that ingredient updates automatically too.

A suggested weekly routine

• Every day: Enter purchase invoices (5 minutes)
• Every week: Check low-stock alerts and place orders accordingly
• Every month: Do a stock count; close discrepancies with reason codes and investigate the source of large ones
• When prices go up: Do nothing — if the invoice was entered, costs are already updated; just review the prices of products whose profit margin has dropped