Food Cost Control - Product Credits & Transfers

Managing Restaurant & Hotel Food Inventory - (Part 2 of 4)

One major component of managing your food cost is managing your inventory.  Controlling your end of month food inventory revolves around four specific tasks:  Taking inventory, verify credits & transfers, verify the pre-closing food inventory balance sheet, and check posted inventory.  Managing each step of this process is vital to being on top of your numbers.  

Verify Product Credits, Transfers, and Marketing Credits

Verify with accounting that all of your product credits are correctly recorded.  Be sure that you have received any credits that you should have gotten from product that was returned.  Keep a separate file throughout the month to track credits that you should be receiving so it will be easy to track these down at the end of the month.  If you receive transfers from, or make transfers to, other departments within your operation, verify those numbers to make sure that they accurately reflect both the correct quantity and the correct price.  

If you participate in food shows, charity events, or other marketing events, you should keep track of your food cost for those events.  Even if your company does not have a budget line for marketing events, you should still track your cost for these events.  This way, if your food cost comes in unusually high for that month you can say, “I had a half a point of cost due to this event that we did to promote our business.”

If you don't see these credits/transfers posted to your account then verify with accounting what the status on them is. Are they to be posted to your account next month?  Or did they accidentally get posted to a different account? 

 Continue the article on the verifying the Food Inventory Sheet page.