Restaurant management is hard. Probably you already know some of these ways, other readers do not even imagine that these small details are the cause of losing thousands of dollars a year or closing a promising business.
Advanced POS Solutions (APS) with more than 15 years of experience in consulting and POS systems provider for the hospitality and food service industry, based on their experience, this “50 ways to lose money in a restaurant” to help you identify and correct them.
50 ways to lose money in a restaurant
- Combining smaller checks with large parties thus getting paid twice for the same tab
- Charging other customers’ credit cards for cash sales and pocketing the cash
- Not charging for chargeable extras
- Buddy clocking
- Not recording comps to get bigger tips
- Milking the Clock
- Under-purchasing
- Overproduction of prepared goods
- Over-pouring to get a bigger tips
- Over-purchasing
- Kitchen preparation mistakes
- Server ordering mistakes
- Serving free drinks, salads, or desserts to get a bigger tips
- Under-pouring to build a bank of liquor and pocketing the sales from that bank
- Bringing in their own liquor and pocketing the sales from those bottles
- Keeping manual tabs, then not entering all the sales from those tabs, keeping the difference
- Cooks giving free items to servers to sell and split the profits
- Faking breakage and spillage sheets and pocketing the sales from those “broken” and “spilled” items
- Snacking, nibbling, and drinking – personal consumption
- Ordering an item, getting paid, then transferring that item to another table in the computer (floating beverage scam)
- Diluting liquor with water or cheaper liquor and pocketing the additional sales from that bottle
- Comping or discounting food and drinks to friends or family (and their friends)
- Ringing in beer bottles as draft beer because kegs are harder to control
- Ringing normal sales at happy hour prices and pocketing the difference
- Faking normal sales as “walk-outs” and pocketing the difference
- Serving premium drinks or mixed drinks and ringing them as well drinks and keeping the difference
- Serving imported and microbrew draft beers and ringing them in as domestic draft beers
- Serving premium wines and ringing in a house wines and pocketing the difference
- Preparing the drink wrong, replacing it, and then selling it to someone else without ringing it in
- Ringing in regular sales under “special promotion” items and pocketing the difference.
- Over-portioning
- Under portioning
- Low yields – waste
- Signing for goods that were not delivered
- Spoilage
- Short weights
- Theft by delivery drivers
- Accepting damaged goods
- Stealth pricing – prices rising slowly until you notice
- Accepting a padded order
- Employees damaging goods so that they can take the “damaged” goods home
- Selling miscellaneous or “open food” at discounted prices
- Turning in their own discount coupons and keeping the cash
- Giving friends or family employee only discounts
- Server and manager deleting items after collecting for full check
- Using Mgr ID #’s to perform voids and returns on cash checks
- Putting product into garbage cans and then removing those items from the dumpster at a later time
- Adding drinks not delivered to large parties knowing they won’t be able to protest exact # of drinks ordered
- Changing the tip amount on the credit card authorization slip
- Reversing the sales tax status on Bar Tabs and pocketing the sales tax
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