The Importance of Stock Auditing
Stock auditing is crucial for businesses to maintain efficiency and profitability. It quickly identifies irregularities, low-profit items, and stock losses. The process involves calculating consumption, deducting allowances for wastage and own drinks, and reconciling overall surplus or deficit. Detailed product analysis is provided along with recommendations for corrective action.
Challenges and Benefits
Liquor stocktaking can be laborious, especially when measuring stocks by tots or kegs. Despite its importance, it's often overlooked compared to operational tasks. Auditors require comprehensive information including delivery notes, invoices, records for pipe-cleaning, wastage, staff drinks, and income figures.
Regular auditing is vital for businesses like hotels, pubs, bars, and restaurants to prevent theft, fraud, inconsistencies, and excessive staff drinks.
It helps with detecting issues early, enabling you to make immediate adjustments to business operations.
For instance, discrepancies between sales recorded and actual stock consumed can indicate theft or errors. Rigorous checking of deliveries and proper supervision can prevent short delivery and theft. Historical stock data highlights trends such as increased wastage or theft issues.
Ultimately, the costs and time invested in stock auditing are outweighed by the savings and improved profitability it brings. Stocktaking improves accounting accuracy by accounting for shrinkage as wastage costs, reducing taxable profits. For those aiming to enhance their bar's efficiency and profitability, InnMaster offers reliable support in achieving impeccable stock control and maximizing gross profit margins.
How to do a stocktake yourself easily with InnMaster
There are 3 main tasks involved in doing a stocktake using InnMaster
1. Count the stock
The best way to complete a stock count is to download the CSV count spreadsheet from InnMaster, record the counts using a tablet, then upload it again once completed. There is also a touch screen count entry system on the website, but this is dependent on a solid WiFi connection. InnMaster will also produce a simple paper-based count sheet if manual entry is your preference.
2. Record the purchases
InnMaster has a facility to place your orders from within the website, then you can email them directly to suppliers or download a PDF order sheet and phone it through. Once the order arrives you can mark items delivered or missing, then the total can be checked against the invoice making it a 'good practice' way of ensuring delivery and billing are correct.
3. Record the income
Your takings figures can be pulled into the stocktake directly from the weekly business sheet within InnMaster, so by recording your income as part of your end-of-week you will have already recorded and calculated your income for the stock period.
Since the purchases and income are already recorded as part of the weekly bookkeeping process, all that remains is to count the stock. This is a task that takes no more than a couple of hours, once a month.
Once your stocktake is completed you will be left with a surplus/deficit figure which you will then need to account for by analysing your business activity within the period. For example; How much wastage has there been due to line cleaning and drip trays. Keeping records of these will help you account for your shortages.