STOCK & COST3 Oct 202610 min read
Stop losing money to wastage: stock, purchases and cost control
Spoiled stock, missed deliveries and a vendor price that quietly crept up. How a connected stockroom shows where your margin goes.
NBy the Navalyst team
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Most restaurants know their sales. Far fewer know their real cost of sales, because stock lives in someone’s head and wastage is written on the back of a bill. The leak is rarely dramatic — it is a little each day: a tray dropped, a tomato box left out, an over-prepared batch, a delivery that was short by a kilo nobody checked.
Margin is made or lost in these small, repeated moments. The goal of a connected stockroom is not to police your team; it is to make the small leaks visible early enough to fix them.
The chain: from vendor to plate
Cost control works best when you can follow an ingredient the whole way. Navalyst POS connects the three places it passes through: the vendor you buy from, the stock you hold, and the sales that use it up.
- Record purchases against vendors, so you can see who you buy from, what you paid and what is still owed
- Stock deducts automatically as items sell, so the count tracks service instead of lagging behind it
- Log wastage with a reason — spoiled, dropped, expired, over-prepared — and see its cost, not only its quantity
- Low-stock and out-of-stock signals appear before the lunch rush, not during it
Vendors and purchases: know what you paid
Supplier prices drift. A vendor who was cheapest in January is rarely cheapest in October, but without a record you cannot tell. Keeping purchases by vendor gives you a running history: what you bought, at what price, and how much remains unpaid. It also makes month-end less painful, because your accountant can see purchases beside sales instead of in a shoebox.
Wastage: the number nobody wants to write down
Wastage entries feel like confessions, which is why they are skipped. The trick is making them quick and blame-free: pick the item, enter the quantity, choose a reason. The reason matters more than the quantity, because it points at the fix.
What each wastage reason usually points to
| Reason | What it often means | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Spoiled | Storage, temperature or ordering too much | Smaller, more frequent orders; check cold storage |
| Expired | Slow-moving item stocked in bulk | Lower par level; promote it; swap supplier |
| Dropped | Pressure, layout or training | Review the workflow at the busiest station |
| Over-prepared | Prep sheet bigger than demand | Prep from yesterday’s sales, not habit |
- Auto
- stock deduction on every sale
- Reason
- recorded for each wastage entry
- 1 view
- for sales against cost
A weekly routine that takes twenty minutes
- 1
Check low and out-of-stock
Start the week by scanning what is running low, so orders are placed before the shortfall, not after.
- 2
Review wastage by reason
Open the wastage report. Look for one or two reasons that dominate and ask what changed in the kitchen that week.
- 3
Compare purchases with sales
Place purchases beside sales. If purchases rise faster than sales, something is leaking.
- 4
Check vendor balances
See what you still owe each vendor and plan payments, so suppliers stay friendly and deliveries stay on time.
“You cannot manage what you do not record, and you will not record what takes more than ten seconds.”
Reading the numbers together
Reports show sales, profit, wastage and purchases side by side, so you can spot the week wastage jumped, the vendor whose prices moved, or the dish that sells well but earns little. Profit is only meaningful once cost is visible, and visible cost depends on stock being recorded as it moves.
- Stock
- Wastage
- Purchases
