Ready to ditch the spreadsheets, streamline your ordering, and say goodbye to wasted ingredients? With Restaurant365, you’re not just managing inventory, but you’re also gaining complete control over your restaurant’s financial health.
Ready to ditch the spreadsheets, streamline ordering, and say goodbye to wasted ingredients? From specialized tools to all-in-one options, explore the best inventory management software for restaurants.
From rotting produce to inaccurate ordering, poor inventory management is a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t help that restaurants are the culprit of 48% of all food waste in the U.S., translating to $162 billion in lost revenue.
That’s where modern inventory software comes in. The right solutions equip restaurants with the tools to take control of stock, optimize purchasing, and maximize profits.
Below, explore seven of the best restaurant inventory software options in 2024 to determine which one is best for your operation.
Restaurant365 isn’t just another inventory software. It’s an all-in-one command center for mastering your restaurant’s back of house, from accounting to workforce management.
Its inventory management empowers restaurant owners to make smarter purchasing decisions, optimize their inventory flow, and watch profits skyrocket.
Key features include:
Toast offers inventory management tools through the xtraCHEF by Toast platform. This integration allows operators to seamlessly connect their Toast POS sales data with inventory data, providing insights into best-selling items, popular modifiers, and overall inventory performance.
TouchBistro is another familiar name in the restaurant world, known for its user-friendly POS system and built-in inventory management tool. Track ingredients down to the teaspoon, build recipes with a few taps, and know the exact cost of every dish on your menu.
Craftable stands out with its precise recipe and plate costing tools. It’s not just about keeping track of what’s in your pantry. It’s also important to understand the details of your ingredients, recipes, and costs, so you can craft a profitable menu down to the garnish.
Craftable’s precision goes beyond individual dishes: It connects directly to thousands of food service vendors, automatically updating ingredient costs and streamlining the ordering process. With a few clicks, you can generate purchase orders and dispatch them instantly via EDI, API, or your vendor’s preferred method.
For those who manage a bustling bar, Craftable’s Bevager module provides specialized tools like bottle sliders, pour calculators, and keg credit tracking to give you control over your beverage program and minimize liquor losses.
Designed to simplify and optimize the entire inventory process, MarginEdge helps you take control of your food costs and minimize waste. Complete inventory counts quickly thanks to its mobile counting capabilities and automated product updates.
For bars and restaurants with extensive beverage programs, MarginEdge offers Freepour, a tool that uses image recognition to measure liquor levels for proper inventory management.
Revel Systems might be known for its sleek POS terminals, but don’t underestimate its inventory management system. Like the others on this list, Revel helps you ditch the guesswork and make informed ordering decisions, ensuring you always have the right amount of everything on hand.
Revel also takes security seriously, making it perfect for bars and larger restaurant operations needing granular inventory tracking. It offers tools to combat theft and shrinkage, like detailed user permissions, blind inventory counts that prevent employees from fudging the numbers, and comprehensive reporting that helps identify discrepancies.
While many platforms on this list try to be everything to everyone, MarketMan takes a different approach: They’re laser-focused on inventory management alone. Designed for restaurants that are serious about optimizing their food costs and streamlining their supply chain, MarketMan goes beyond the basics, offering powerful automation that transforms the inventory process.
For example, when supplier prices change, costs are automatically updated, ensuring recipe costing and profits are always accurate. When you set order thresholds, the system will proactively alert you when it’s time to restock, preventing those dreaded last-minute shortages.
Restaurant inventory management software is a platform that helps operators track stock levels, manage purchasing, reduce waste, and analyze food costs in real time. The most effective solutions connect inventory data to recipe costing, purchasing, and accounting so the financial impact of every inventory decision is visible without manual data assembly.
The best inventory management software depends on your operation’s size and needs. Standalone tools like MarketMan and Craftable are strong options for operators who want focused inventory and recipe costing functionality. For operators who want inventory connected to accounting, payroll, and workforce management in one platform, Restaurant365 is purpose-built for restaurant back-office operations and connects every back-office function in one system.
Inventory management software reduces food waste by tracking spoilage, identifying over-ordering patterns, and connecting purchasing to actual usage data. When inventory counts flow automatically into food cost reporting, operators can see where waste is occurring by ingredient, category, or location and adjust purchasing and prep accordingly rather than discovering the problem at period end.
Recipe costing calculates the exact cost of each menu item based on current ingredient prices. When recipe costs are tied to live purchasing data, a vendor price change flows into the cost of every affected dish automatically. This gives operators accurate menu profitability data and prevents the common problem of pricing and selling dishes based on ingredient costs that are months out of date.
When inventory software connects to purchasing, recipe costing, and accounting in the same platform, actual versus theoretical food cost is visible in real time. Operators can see the gap between what food should have cost based on recipes and what it actually cost based on purchases and counts, broken down by ingredient, category, and location, during the period rather than at close.
Standalone inventory tools like MarketMan and MarginEdge focus exclusively on inventory and purchasing workflows. They do this well but require integration with separate accounting and payroll systems, which means data still moves between platforms manually or through integrations that can create lag and errors. All-in-one platforms like Restaurant365 connect inventory to accounting, payroll, and workforce management natively so every food dollar spent flows automatically into the P&L without manual transfer.
Yes. Restaurant365 is specifically designed for multi-location operations, with centralized inventory management, standardized purchasing workflows, approved vendor catalogs, and consolidated food cost reporting across every location in one platform. For operators managing inventory across five, ten, or twenty locations, a connected platform that standardizes workflows and consolidates reporting is significantly more efficient than managing separate systems at each location.
Mobile inventory counting allows multiple team members to count simultaneously on smartphones or tablets, with results flowing directly into food cost reporting without manual entry. This eliminates the transcription errors that occur when counts are done on paper and entered into a system later, speeds up the counting process significantly, and ensures inventory data is always current rather than reflecting a point-in-time count that is already hours old by the time it is entered.
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Ready to ditch the spreadsheets, streamline your ordering, and say goodbye to wasted ingredients? With Restaurant365, you’re not just managing inventory, but you’re also gaining complete control over your restaurant’s financial health.
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