How to track wastage in the restaurant business?
In addition to improving food cost control, keeping track of and recording every occurrence of food waste at your restaurant is essential for general restaurant accounting best practices. You'll be able to see why inventory values are inaccurate and why your restaurant's cost of goods sold (COGS) figures aren't adding up as they should.
Initiatives to manage food waste might be as easy as updating a spreadsheet each time a waste event takes place. Just create a sheet with columns for the wasted ingredient or recipe, the date and time of the incident, the employee's name, and a space for any more remarks or background.
You can use a tracker to identify trends in waste occurrences once it has been set up. For instance, if food waste from refills consistently rises on days that a particular front-of-house person works, it can be a sign that they are making mistakes that can be corrected with more training.
However, the monetary value of what was lost is not taken into consideration when recording food waste manually.
Fortunately, real-time reports and food waste tracking software make it simple to determine the precise cost of those errors to the company.