Restaurant Profitability Blog

Why you Should Be Paying your Vendors with Digital Payments 

Tracking, recording and paying invoices by hand is a headache that all restaurant owners, operators and bookkeepers have to deal with. 

Accounts Payable (AP) automation is a technology that addresses these inefficiencies that restaurants have turned to. 

An automated invoice processing system allows restaurant operators to spend less time with paper invoices and more time on restaurant operations. This provides a stellar experience for guests. 

Digital payments to vendors are a growing trend in the restaurant industry. To better understand the benefits of a digital payment process, we’ve added some notes below. 

INDUSTRY SHIFTS TOWARDS DIGITAL PAYMENTS 

AP departments historically recorded vendor invoices manually, cross-checked numbers by hand, entered them in system and sent payments via paper check. Like any manual process, technology has been able to streamline this process, saving time and money for operators. 

So why are AP teams and vendors turning to virtual payments? 

Simply put, virtual payments replace a scheduled paper check and eliminate manual paperwork. 

LESS COST THAN MANUAL PAYMENTS 

Paper checks may seem like standard practice but there are several hidden costs involved. Sending checks in the mail incurs the cost of postage as well as the time it takes to send a paper check and record the transaction. 

Once a payment is sent, you then need to wait for the payment to post and ensure the balance in your account will cover said payment. This process could take days or weeks to ensure the right person receives the check and claims it in a timely manner. 

Digital Payments on the other hand cost significantly less money and post immediately, leaving a digital paper trail attached to the invoice and showing exactly where the payment is being applied. 

MORE EFFICIENCY AND ACCURACY 

Digital payments can be sent and received in a matter of days. This allows restaurants to pay their vendors faster with fewer opportunities for miscommunication and errors. 

With paper invoices, each invoice must be manually entered into a system and continually checked for accuracy.  Because there are so many steps involved to ensure accuracy, you are paying for it in time and resources. 

Digital payments provide consistency. Digital payment systems check for duplicate invoices and verify amounts. You can even set payment approval rules that are automatically routed through the system. This is perfect for multi-unit operators. Your team can reference back and understand the status of each invoice and what is pending approval or in process. 

With this streamline efficiency the team is able to focus on more important tasks like running the restaurant. 

WHY VENDORS LOVE DIGITAL PAYMENTS 

Vendors are becoming more interested in virtual payments for a number of reasons. Everyone likes to be paid faster and on time. Vendors are no exception. Digital payments allow vendors to receive payments quickly and on time. No more following up with customers looking for paper checks. 

Overall, digital payments allow you to streamline your Accounts Payable Process by adding efficiencies to every step. Digital Payments allow you to pay how you want and when you want. They even provide a less costly, more reliable and safer solution to writing paper checks. 

I’m sure all your personal financing and bill pay is done electronically. Why should your restaurant be any different? 

HOW TO GET STARTED 

Schedule time with our team to learn more and get set up today! 

Andy RosenbloomWhy you Should Be Paying your Vendors with Digital Payments 
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Why Automate your Accounts Payable? 

For whatever reason, restaurants are one of the last industries to embrace technology. Technology has easily allowed other industries to thrive, while restaurants are still in the dark ages using clipboards and pencil. 

We want to help improve the way you spend time in the back office. Automating your Accounts Payables is one of the easiest ways to streamline a historically time-consuming and manual task.  

Here are 6 reason why you should automate your Accounts Payables with us today! 

Save Time 

Automating your Accounts Payables easily cuts down the time that you used to spend manually keying in invoices and paying them. Let’s get you back in the kitchen and out from behind a computer! 

Cost Savings 

Automating your Accounts Payables saves on the time cost of a bookkeeper or accountant and streamlines your communication with them. You’ll also save on writing and mailing paper checks.  

Eliminate Manual Data Entry Errors 

Errors can easily occur when manually keying in invoices which costs you even more time when trying to fix these errors. Automating your Accounts Payables process eliminates data entry errors. Simply upload an invoice. We then digitize that invoice making sure your data is accurate and up to date. 

Schedule Payments to be Made on Time 

Time gets the best of us, and a late payment is the last thing you want. Using an automated Account payables system allows you to stay on top of invoice status’ and even schedule payments on time.  

A Digital Filing Cabinet 

Automating your Accounts Payables process allows you to easily digitize invoices and keep them in one organized space. Easily access invoices from anywhere without keeping them in a box in the back office. 

Reconcile Your Books Faster 

The faster you can reconcile your books the quicker you can find issues. Automating your Accounts Payables allows you to reconcile your books quicker without the manual data entry providing you with accurate data integrity and up to date books in real time.  

Interested in learning more and getting set up? Reach out to our team today! 

Andy RosenbloomWhy Automate your Accounts Payable? 
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What Are Accounts Payables? 

You’ve heard the term Accounts Payable a thousand times, maybe even a million. It’s probably instilled in your mind and has become second nature at this point. Or maybe it hasn’t. 

Either way, it’s okay. We’re here to give you the 411 on everything you need to know in relation to Accounts Payable. 

Accounts Payable is the money due to vendors or suppliers for goods or services received. In short, it is money that has not been paid yet. 

Accounts Payable could be anything from ingredients and disposables to your lease and licenses you need to operate your restaurant. 

For restaurant operators, this process can be laborious, frustrating, and unreliable. Accounting itself is already stressful. When you’re a fast-paced restaurant, you have invoices coming in almost every day. It’s hard to keep up with every single order you receive… and having to count and process it all too?! Forget about it. Nobody has the time for that, especially in 2022. 

KEEPING TRACK OF NUMBERS 

When running a restaurant, it’s important to keep your numbers accurate and consistent. Whether it’s your food costs, cost of goods sold, or inventory—you never want to see errors. 

Although, when you’re making multiple orders every week, you’re bound to come across vendor payment issues every so often. This ranges from delays to late fees, increased operational costs, or even strained relationships between you and your vendors. Nobody wants to experience this, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s inevitable. 

You want to make sure you’re keeping track of your payment schedule as soon as you receive an invoice. The best way to do this is to keep track of inventory in a timely, organized manner. It’s easy to misplace files when you have hundreds coming in regularly. This is where technology comes in. 

MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNTS PAYABLE WITH TECHNOLOGY 

Do you really have time to write checks, stuff envelopes, and mail them out when you have a handful of other things take care of? Time is valuable now more than ever. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one less thing to worry about? BillPay is a great solution to modernizing your Accounts Payable. 

By implementing technology into this process, you can put time back into your day and save money. When using BillPay, you can see all of your bills, choose when to schedule them out, and the status of each payment, all in one centralized location. 

This also means you can pay your bills from anywhere at any time—whether you’re away on a beach somewhere or lying in bed enjoying a glass of wine, it’s available to you at all hours, right from your fingertips. 

Online transactions are secure and safe to use, and they prevent you from any fraud. You can monitor each of your payments to see when they have arrived and been processed. No more scrambling through tracking codes from the Post Office and waiting over the phone for hours to check the status of your payment. It’s updated in real-time when done online. 

There’s no better feeling than taking control over your accounting. It’s a tedious process but making use out of technology makes it a lot easier. 

If you pay all of your personal bills online—mortgage, phone, utilities, then why not your restaurant bills too? It’s 2022, embrace technology. It’s here to help. 

HOW TO GET STARTED 

Schedule time with our team to learn more and set up your account today! 

Andy RosenbloomWhat Are Accounts Payables? 
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It’s Time to Streamline Your Accounts Payables Process! 

Not only does Orderly allow our customers to manage things like recipe costs, inventory and food costs, but we also allow users to pay any of their vendors directly from our platform. This is the only software to complete the entire process from receiving an invoice to paying that invoice. 

Traditionally, restaurants pay their vendors in a few different ways. Manually writing checks, using credit cards or another third party system. This process could easily lead to confusion and a duplication of work. 

WHO MAILS CHECKS ANYMORE? 

When was the last time you paid a personal bill by check? When was the last time your employer PAID YOU with a physical check? My guess is it’s been a while. Why should paying your vendors be any different? 

The biggest benefit of using digital payments is to save your operations time. With labor and supply chain shortages still hanging on our shoulders, your operations team is pressed on their most valuable commodity, time. 

Our bill pay tool saves your team from manually verifying and collecting invoices, writing checks and reconciling spreadsheets. Simply upload an invoice and we handle the rest. 

You can see your bills, approve those that should be paid and send payments all from one platform. 

SECURE YOUR PAYMENTS 

Our online payment transactions are secure and provide a digital paper trail showing you exactly who did what and when. You can also easily track your digital payments to see when they were posted by your vendor. 

Our Bill Pay solution allows you to monitor and control approval workflows, giving permissions to different users on who could approve payments giving you more control over your entire payments process. 

Greater flexibility should be key to paying your bills and planning cash flow. You shouldn’t be chained to a desk tracking down invoices and writing physical checks. You should be using a system that works with you and gives you the flexibility to pay bills as needed. 

We’re not saying you should be paying bills from the beach while on vacation. We’re just saying with our system, you can. 

GETTING STARTED 

Schedule time with our team to learn more about streamlining your Accounts Payables and getting set up today! 

Andy RosenbloomIt’s Time to Streamline Your Accounts Payables Process! 
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AP Automation is No Longer a Luxury. It’s a Necessity.  

Technology in restaurant operations continues to play a very important role and is no longer a luxury but a necessity.  

Accounts Payable is the next back-office task to be taken over by automation eliminating the need for manual data entry and long invoice life-cycles. Restaurants are inundated with invoices on a daily basis. Keeping track of these physical paper invoices proves to be easier said than done. Paper invoices are easily lost, damaged or thrown in the trash before they ever hit your books. If a paper invoice does make it to your accountant, the time they are inputting with manual data entry is absurd. 

It’s not sustainable to maintain this analog process anymore. It’s time to manage your AP more efficiently with our automated AP technology.  

So, how does our Accounts Payable Automation Software work? 

Upload and Digitize: Your team easily uploads an invoice by snapping a photo as the delivery arrives at your kitchen. We then digitize that invoice and keep it in a digital filing cabinet. No more stacks of paper invoices on your desk! 

Invoice Coding: After snapping a photo of an invoice, our software digitizes each invoice pulling out the item, quantity purchased pack size and price. We do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to.  

Approval Workflows: Customize your approver rules for as much (or little) control as you would like. Ensure your team stays on track and easily review and approve invoices, then move on with their day.   

Pay: Select the invoices you want directly from our app. Pay supplies by either cc, check or ACH. Payments are sent directly to your vendor! 

Accounting Integration: Map ingredients directly to your Chart of Accounts once. We’ll take care of it moving forward. Did we mention we work seamlessly with Quickbooks Online so you don’t have to? 

The key takeaway is that you can continue to use resources on a manual AP process, or you can embrace technology to automate manual tasks and focus on more important initiatives. 

Schedule time with our team to learn more today! 

Andy RosenbloomAP Automation is No Longer a Luxury. It’s a Necessity.  
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5 Ways Online Account Payable Tools Make Life Easier

Whether we accept it or not—we all know how helpful technology is these days. It’s the key to solving most, if not all our problems. Today, technology is used in healthcare, education, retail, foodservice—all of the above. It’s everywhere. 

The point is it makes life easier. When you’re a restaurant operator, you’re constantly looking for ways to reduce unnecessary time that’s spent and save money, right? It seems like we’re all running short on time and spending more money than usual these days. 

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. We know you’re already implementing the use of technology in certain areas of your operation, I mean, who isn’t? Why not implement it into one more? Your Accounts Payables.  

Let’s look at 5 ways using online account payable tools make your life easier. 

FLEXIBILITY 

Have you ever come home from work and realized you’ve forgotten to pay a bill? It happens too often—we’re all human. Wouldn’t it be convenient to pay your bills from anywhere using whatever method works for you? 

When using technology, you open a door to flexibility. What works for you may not work for someone else. So, with a variety of options on how to pay, when to pay, and where to pay from, there’s bound to be a way that works for everyone. 

You’re not limited to any one place or method; you do what works best for you. The plus side is your vendor isn’t affected by your choice of payment either. It’s a win-win situation! 

SAVE MONEY 

When you go paperless, you save a LOT of money. No more purchasing paper checks, envelopes, stamps, ink—literally anything you’d need to get your bills out the door and into the hands of your vendors. 

No more transaction fees or bank fees! Let’s face it, you’re probably paying anywhere from $10-$40 per transaction and that adds up FAST. That means you could be paying up to $400 extra for just TEN transactions. It’s 2022, ditch the bank, go online. ACH transfers are in. 

Even if you pay with a credit card online, your fee would still be cheaper than before! So, it doesn’t matter what method you choose for paying as long as you’re using an online Accounts Payable tool. 

Let’s also not forget the amount of time your staff may be putting in to pay those bills—sometimes even staying overtime to crank them out. Wouldn’t it be nice to use that time doing something else? If you’re paying your staff to spend all their time paying your bills, it’s time to switch over to technology. 

SECURITY 

Everyone’s worst nightmare is getting their check lost or stolen in the mail. It happens to everyone. When you go digital, you won’t have to worry about this ever being an issue again. 

Digital payments leave a clear trail the second the money leaves your account. Both you and your vendor will receive confirmations during this process, and you’ll even be able to check the status of your payment the minute it leaves your account to the minute it enters theirs. 

Was it delivered? Was it processed? When was it received? Are there any changes to be made? You’ll be able to answer all of these questions in an instant when you switch your Accounts Payable online. 

There’s really nothing to worry about when using technology for your bill pay. Online payment tools come with encryption and security protocols that help you avoid fraud and keep your payment secure. 

UNDERSTANDING CASH FLOW 

When you pay your bills the old traditional way with paper, it’s easy to lose track of your cashflow. The process of recording your payment data in an excel spreadsheet is tedious and labor-intensive. 

It gets complicated and hard to keep up with, and once you forget to input one data entry, you fall right off track. And let’s not forget how difficult it is to view ALL of your data at once. It’s nearly impossible! 

When you switch to technology, you can monitor your spend, compare your cash-in/cash-out, and easily view any problems that may occur. 

This all contributes to making better business decisions and helps your streamline your operation’s cashflow. 

REDUCE ERRORS AND STREAMLINE INVOICES 

We all make mistakes, we’re human. So it’s no surprise that cutting edge technology is exactly what we need to avoid these errors and streamline our operations. 

Switching to automated Accounts Payable means you’ll reduce errors you may accidentally miss when manually entering data into your old-school excel spreadsheet after making a payment. Maybe you even overpaid or underpaid your vendor, it happens, but it doesn’t have to continue this way. 

When you use account payable technology, you eliminate room for error because the software is able to extract the exact data directly from your electronic invoices—this is where Food Cost Management technology comes into play. It perfectly reads and identifies the exact amount owed and the date of which it needs to be paid. It’s trustworthy and ground-breaking. 

No more paper invoices! Everything goes electronic. The technology is able to identify important points in your invoices just by scanning through a quick screenshot. 

Your staff can even approve, authorize, or reject payments directly through their phone. Each step of the process is recorded in the case of needing to go back to review the actions that were taken to pay the bill. 

What more could you ask for? 

AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNTS PAYABLE TODAY 

Automating your payment process is crucial in 2022 to help avoid error, save money, and salvage time. 

Embrace technology and streamline your Accounts Payables process! 

Schedule time with us to learn more and get set up today!  

Andy Rosenbloom5 Ways Online Account Payable Tools Make Life Easier
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Recipe Costing for Your Restaurant Has Never Been Easier

Recipe Costing is not a one-time occurrence, it’s an ongoing process. When food costs change, your recipe costs also change.

The actual purpose behind plate costing is so that you can price your menu items in a way that ensures you’ll make money.

If you notice a higher food cost than usual, you can adjust your selling price, reduce portion sizes or, find the same or a similar ingredient at a lower cost.

As much as you enjoy the restaurant industry, at the end of the day, you have to make profit.

So how exactly do you calculate the cost for a recipe?

What is Recipe Costing?

Recipe costing is exactly what it sounds like—calculating the cost of a single dish on the menu.

If you’ve ever written a menu, then you know how complicated and time consuming this process can be.

Plus, if you’re anything like me and not good at math, things just got MUCH harder.

How to Calculate Plate Cost

Let’s make a burger:

Step One: Measure out the quantity of each ingredient in a dish (8oz ground beef, 1 bun, 2oz pickles, 1oz ketchup etc.)

Step Two: Calculate the price for each ingredient in the dish. Things get tricky here because you are dealing with different pack sizes and units of measure. Let’s use ground beef as an example.

Your recipe requires 8oz of ground beef, but when you bought the ground beef it came in a 5lb package. We will need to convert 5lbs to ounces. (16oz=1lb. 5×16= 80oz)

We now need to determine the price per ounce. Since the original purchase cost was $30, we simply divide $30 by 80 which equals $0.37 per ounce.

To determine the cost of an 8oz patty we multiply 8 x $0.37 which equals $3. So, $3 for our 8oz burger patty.

Step Three: Complete the following for every item in that recipe and add them together. This equals your plate cost (recipe cost) in a dollar amount.

Step Four: Calculate Food Cost:

Recipe Cost ÷ Selling Price x 100 will give you your Food Cost Percentage

You will have to do this for EVERY item on your menu! Who’s got time for that?

To make it even more difficult, ingredient prices are constantly changing. The price for the ground beef in your burger just went up $3 a pound, decreasing your margins.

You now have the glorious task of going back into every recipe and changing the price for ground beef. This happens week after week with almost every ingredient!

The Orderly Way

Hopefully by now you get the gist of this post. Recipe Costing is SO important but also extremely difficult to maintain.

Orderly was developed for chefs, by chefs, to be the easiest and most reliable food costing tool on the market. The less time you spend in our software, the more time you have to do what you truly love!

Simply build your recipes in Orderly once. One time.

That’s it.

With every invoice that comes into the system, Orderly will automatically update the ingredient price showing you the true cost of the recipe today and the current margins based off your selling price!

This allows you to make many updates and revisions as a problem arises.

Buying a new ingredient or your vendor sent a substitution? No problem!

Orderly groups together substitute ingredients with the products you typically buy.

This means that regardless of whether you bought Hormel Apple Wood Smoked Bacon last week or Oscar Myer Apple Wood Smoked Bacon this week, Orderly will group these like-items together and use them interchangeably in your recipes depending on which item you bought most recently, giving you the most up-to-date price for every menu item you build in Orderly!

Recipe costing is something that NEEDS to be done to ensure you are running a profitable business.

FINALLY, a solution resilient to substitutions and supplier changes. 

Say goodbye to daily recipe maintenance!

Ready to put your recipe costing on autopilot and receive up-to-date food cost insights?

Reach out today and our team will be happy to discuss how Orderly can help!

OrderlyRecipe Costing for Your Restaurant Has Never Been Easier
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Everything You Need to Know About Managing Your Inventory

The words “take inventory” are enough to make your staff cringe and run off in 30 different directions.

You’ve tried getting your staff to do it and it just doesn’t go well. They fudge numbers and are very inconsistent.

Instead, you try to do it yourself, but every time you pick up the pen and clipboard, there’s a dozen other fires to put out.

Yet somehow you get by, for now at least…

Why Inventory Matters

Inventory management for a restaurant can be a cross between gibberish and long division. In fact, it’s such a pain that the task can often fall to the bottom of the to-do list, where it sits unchecked for the week. Then weeks turn into months. Uh oh.

I don’t need to explain why taking inventory is important. You know it’s important.

Your inventory is one of the biggest assets of your restaurant. You should always know how much of it you have, and how much it’s all worth.

It’s also a way to help keep your costs down and avoid any food waste, spoilage, or theft. It allows you to know when you’re running low on product and when you have an excess.

Why Should My Current Inventory Process be Ditched?

I remember my old restaurant days. Sunday night was our designated inventory day. The kitchen team would break up the inventory list so we could get through it quicker. I’d take the walk-in, Jenny took dry goods, and Ben took the alcohol closet. We all rushed to count what was on the shelves and filled in our spreadsheets as quickly as possible.

Needless to say, the problem with our inventory process was immediately clear.

Nothing ever lined up correctly.

Big ticket items were always being counted lower than expected and out of nowhere, someone would stumble upon three 50lb bags of AP flour.

Our kitchen was a disorganized mess. Items were spread out EVERYWHERE, making it extremely difficult to count.

Lemons? They could be found in the bar area, walk-in fridge, even dry storage. Who knows?

See the case of avocados over there?  I would count it as half a case. Jenny would count it as half a case half the time, and two-thirds the rest of the time. Ben would just walk right by it, just trying to get out of the restaurant before midnight. Counting discrepancies were simply unavoidable.

At the end of the day, we were spending too much time taking inventory and the information we gathered was STILL always wrong.

By the time we got our Cost of Goods Sold and Inventory for the month of May done, it was the second week of June. We were always reacting on old information instead of course-correcting immediately.

There had to be a better way.

Enter Orderly

The solution is to implement a system that transcends the variability of your staff, doesn’t require hours of work on your end, and gives up-to-date reporting so you can make decisions today before you end up with a problem tomorrow.

Orderly simulates an inventory and logs in your weekly Cost of Goods Sold without having you count a single product. No more relying on Ben and Jenny to take inventory!

By taking a quick photo of your invoices and entering POS sales data, you will receive a weekly rundown of your Cost of Goods Sold, highlighting where and what potential problems may be costing you. It’s as easy as that.

Prefer to take physical inventory? Orderly has you covered!

You can easily set up your inventory by using Orderly’s categories OR you can build custom “shelf to sheet” inventory lists. Milk lives in the walk-in, flour in dry storage, you get the idea.

As you count, on-hand dollar amounts will automatically be calculated, and beginning/ending inventories will show you exactly what you went through over a given period.

Orderly will continue working for you, whether your team has hours to spend counting inventory this week, or they need to rely on our auto-COGS next week.

Rising prices of ingredients, over ordering and product waste can all lead to high food cost. That’s something most (if not all) of us can’t afford, especially during these times.

Knowing that you have high food cost is one thing. Identifying why your food cost is so high is like finding a needle in a haystack. Orderly will help you shrink that haystack so you can easily find the needle and culprit for your rising food costs!

Would you rather spend 5 hours a week counting inventory or 5 minutes a day in Orderly?

Schedule a live walkthrough of Orderly’s food cost management solution!

OrderlyEverything You Need to Know About Managing Your Inventory
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The Basics of Food Cost and Why You Should Care

Food cost is one of the biggest factors of your restaurant’s success. Knowing what it is affects everything from how you price out your menu to what you order on a weekly basis.

Understanding your food cost is especially important during these unprecedented times as many restaurant owners are counting pennies and doing everything in their power to maximize profits.

Most restaurant managers are probably exhausted and stretched thin on time. They’re facing supply chain shortages and staffing issues while doing everything in their power to stay profitable.

Lucky for you, there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

Orderly’s goal is to help you get a handle on food costs. We want you to become more profitable while saving time by following these restaurant basics and implementing some killer technology in the process.

Ready to streamline your operations and put time back on your calendar?

Let’s jump in!

What is Restaurant Food Cost?

When we talk about Food Costs, we are typically referring to Plate Costs (recipe costs) and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

Plate Cost is the amount a specific menu item actually costs you to make. This is calculated by measuring out every ingredient that goes into the dish and the price of the ingredient. In short, it’s the cost of all ingredients added together.

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is the total food cost over a period of time, maybe a week, or even a month. The formula to determine your COGS is (Beginning Inventory + Purchases) – Ending Inventory.

If you’d like to learn more about COGS, read our blog focused mainly on calculating your COGS here!

What is Restaurant Food Cost Percentage?

Food cost is typically expressed as a percentage, hence the term Food Cost Percentage. The rule of thumb is to aim around a 30%, though this could change depending on the type of operation you’re running.

To calculate your this percentage, you would take your total costs for a specific period of time (how much you spent) and divide it by the total sales for that same period and multiply by 100.

What’s the Difference Between Food Cost and Prime Cost?

Perhaps you’ve heard the terms Food Cost and Prime Cost but never understood the difference.

Food Costs are used to calculate Prime Costs.

Your Prime Cost equals your total direct cost of production (raw materials and labor). Your raw materials include things like food and alcohol. Labor costs include things like salary, taxes and benefits.

Because a restaurant’s Prime Cost is one of their largest expenses, by controlling and lowering your prime cost, you can directly increase your bottom line.

Why Should I Care About My Food Cost?

Knowing your food cost is essential to running a successful restaurant. It is another very large expense your restaurant will incur so learning how to control it will allow you to be more profitable.

It is also important to know for when you’re pricing out your menu. Pricing out your menu accurately will ensure you’re hitting the margins you’re aiming for.

Lastly, it affects your prime cost. You have control over your prime cost, which are things like labor or raw materials. What this means for you is that when you notice your food cost rising, you will be able to tighten the strings in other areas to help improve profitability.

So Now What?

Traditionally, the above calculations are done manually. That’s right, painstakingly entering numbers into a spreadsheet on a consistent basis. So much fun! And, if you aren’t consistent, these spreadsheets fall apart and become useless.

The problem with doing the calculations manually is that our industry is changing so fast and on top of that, it’s very chaotic, so it becomes double the work.

Time constraints don’t allow you to spend hours in front of a computer to update invoice prices and sales numbers. Not to mention, unexpected problems also occur in the restaurant industry, such as, your cook calling out or your grease trap deciding to go on vacation. Plus, you have hungry guests to feed! There’s no time to stop and calculate.

Orderly’s technology gives operators the insights they need to make better decisions without all the manual data entry. Why not take advantage of that?

If you’re ready for a hassle-free, stress-free work life, sign up here to get started with Orderly.

OrderlyThe Basics of Food Cost and Why You Should Care
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Cost of Goods Sold – Learn the Ropes of Calculating Your COGS

Do you know your Cost of Goods Sold?

You’ve tried everything when it comes to lowering your food costs but the daily mayhem in your restaurant keeps you so busy that your numbers are falling by the wayside. You’re starting to see more red numbers, and it’s not just because you’re running a pasta special. It sounds all too familiar.

You may know that the key to lowering food costs is knowing your restaurant Cost of Goods Sold. Or maybe you’re reading up on it for the first time.

Either way, if it’s not done right, your COGS won’t help you.

At Orderly, we’re COGS experts. We’ve taken all of our knowledge and compiled it all together— from things we’ve learned working in restaurants ourselves, to data from thousands of customers. Thus, creating a system that puts time and money back in your pocket!

What are COGS anyways?

Cost of Goods Sold are the total cost you can attribute to the production of goods sold over a period of time.

For a restaurant, it’s the total cost it took you to create all the food you sold over a period of time. COGS is also the metric that stands between your pleased regulars returning week after a week and a “closed” sign on your front door.

COGS looks at everything that came into your restaurant over a period of time and your total sales. It also accounts for the ingredients you have on the shelf before and after a given period and measures the overall health of your restaurant.

Why should I calculate my COGS?

If you start calculating and following your restaurants’ COGS, it’ll make a world of difference.

You’ll be able to determine when ingredient prices rise and even negotiate better prices. Your staff will stop over-ordering and you’ll know exactly how much you’re spending each week.

You’ll also know where sales were good and where they lagged, allowing you to adjust your purchases accordingly and control your inventory.

How to calculate COGS?

Calculating your COGS can be a tricky process.

Luckily, Orderly automates this arduous process for its customers. But if you still have an itch to find out how to calculate your COGS, we’ll break it down for you:

(Beginning Inventory + Purchased Inventory) – Ending Inventory = COGS

Your beginning inventory is the amount of product you start with at the beginning of a period (let’s use Monday for this example). This is whatever is left over from last week.

To get this number, your team has spent hours walking around the restaurant counting EVERYTHING—from strawberries in the cooler to sugar in dry storage.

Let’s say you have $3,000 worth of product leftover from the previous week—this is what your beginning inventory would be.

Next, you’ll need to figure out your purchases over that same time period. EVERY SINGLE purchase. Don’t forget to update prices on your inventory count sheet with the latest price you paid for every ingredient!

Finally, we’ve got your ending inventory which entails the amount of inventory leftover at the end of that period. Back in the cooler to count again! Fun, right?

Now let’s calculate:

Beginning Inventory + Purchases – Ending Inventory = COGS

Sound like a lot of work so far? That’s because it is!

Now let’s show you the Orderly way:

1: Snap a photo of each invoice into Orderly as an order comes in

2: Enter your sales on a daily/weekly basis

3: BOOM. Instant COGS!

Orderly was created to give your restaurant accurate COGS without any of the unnecessary hassle we walked through above.

No more counting inventory. No more math problems to dive into.

All you have to do is snap photos of your invoices and update your sales once a week in the Orderly App.

Too good to be true? Well, it’s not!

Our customers have found Orderly’s COGS to be more accurate and consistent than doing it themselves. When taking inventory by hand, your team may guestimate, miss things or just do a sloppy job. I mean, it’s not their fault, who really enjoys taking inventory anyway?

It’s the digital age. Embrace technology that empowers your staff, saves you time and helps you run a more profitable restaurant when you let Orderly take over.


OrderlyCost of Goods Sold – Learn the Ropes of Calculating Your COGS
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