When you are completing your monthly food stocktake you may notice some stock variances, these can occur from time to time, but we have put together the most common reasons for stock variances enabling you to be able to solve the mystery and make changes to avoid stock variances on future food stocktakes.
1. Incorrect Counting
If you have incorrect opening or closing stock then the actual units used will also be incorrect. It is important that you recount our stock but also take the time to stack things so they can be counted easily; for example don’t put full boxes at the front, with numerous half empty boxes towards the back as it will be presumed these are all full boxes.
2. Incorrect Purchases
Incorrect capturing of your Goods Received Delivery Notes/Invoices is often the single biggest cause of stock errors and incorrect gross profits. It is essential that you check and double check that both the quantity and the price of stock are correctly captured to ensure you have the right information.
3. Portion Control
If you find your kitchen is consistently short of a particular item then you may find the issue is overtopping. A good way of checking for this is by getting each person in your team to create 10 sample portions, weigh them together and then divide by 10 to get your average. In almost every case we have seen some staff will be overtopping and others won’t. Spending time training staff members will usually solve this issue quite easily.
4. Short Deliveries
When was the last time you checked the amount of cherries in a pot or slices of ham in a packet? While the weight of the ham and cherries may stay the same, they may now have larger cherries or thicker slices of ham, so as you use 25 cherries in a dessert or 3 slices of ham in a roll, there are now less cherries and slices of ham which means you run out of the product much faster and this shows as a stock variance.
5. Stock Transfers
If you are transferring food stock between two or more venues then make sure you are transferring and reporting the stock correctly or you will find you are up and down on food stocks at different locations. The stock transfers also need to be like for like stock, if weights of a product are less at one venue than another you need to correctly report this.
These are just some of the most common reasons for stock variances, but if you still can’t understand the reason for stock variances in your business, or your food stocktaking is giving you a headache then why not contact us directly; we would be happy to take away that stress for you.