Inventory management for wine merchants and restaurateurs

Managing inventory is never easy for a restaurant owner or wine merchant: tracking incoming and outgoing stock, knowing when to reorder without ending up with excess inventory or stockouts... Whether it’s wine or the ingredients needed for the menu, it’s essential to keep a close eye on inventory to ensure a complete selection for customers and avoid frustration.

Use specialized inventory management software

By equipping yourself with the right tools, you can ensure that nothing slips through the cracks and that you manage your inventory effectively. Tracking inventory using Excel or even a paper spreadsheet can quickly lead to errors and oversights. With digital solutions, there are more reliable and faster ways to monitor all incoming and outgoing bottles and to know the best times to reorder.

Digital tools can therefore help you improve reliability and save a significant amount of time, since many tasks are automated or even eliminated. Saving time on administrative tasks means you have more time to focus on the quality of your service, your product selection, and your cooking. We’ve selected a few tools for you from the wide range of options available for digital inventory management.

For wine inventory management

For wine-specific inventory management, there is the Somm’it tool, which acts as a digital sommelier to help create wine lists, select wines, track wine sales performance, and, most importantly, monitor cellar inventory.

The advantage of this tool is that it allows you to manage your wine sales while alerting you when it’s time to restock. It is specifically designed for wine and is therefore tailored to managing your wine cellar. This strength is also its weakness, as it does not allow you to track inventory for other products in your restaurant—such as ingredients for your menus, other beverages, and so on.

For comprehensive inventory management

If you need a more comprehensive inventory management tool (for managing all products), we recommend L’Addition. L’Addition is a point-of-sale system that goes far beyond inventory management. This tool also includes order taking, payment processing, and a reservation system. The fact that it is so comprehensive makes its inventory management features simple to use and manage. With a single click, you can record incoming quantities and their prices. You’ll also need to set a reorder point—the quantity at which you need to restock your inventory. You can also track stock outflows due to breakage, expired products, and so on. Finally, because this tool is integrated with the order-taking system, servers can immediately see whether a dish is available in the kitchen when taking an order.

In the same vein, there’s also the Easilys tool, which makes it easy to manage inventory receipts and shipments. While this tool isn’t a cash register, it’s still a comprehensive solution since it allows you to manage restaurant menus and recipes—which is also crucial for inventory management, as it helps you track the quantities of each product.

Some basic rules of inventory management

So now you have an idea of the digital tools available for inventory management and their features. Even with this automation, it’s still important to follow a few basic rules when managing your inventory:

• Check regularly to make sure the actual inventory matches what’s shown in the system. It’s always possible that some manual entries—whether for incoming or outgoing items—might have been overlooked.
• Follow the "first in, first out" rule to prevent certain products from expiring and to ensure that inventory is sold off effectively, especially when you want to update your menu
• Estimate your stock levels: stock levels may vary for similar products if the suppliers are different, and delivery times can vary depending on the supplier. You should therefore determine these levels carefully, taking all these factors and potential variables into account.
• For seasonal products, be sure to indicate this clearly on the menu so as not to raise your customers’ hopes in vain.

So you have everything you need to manage your inventory effectively and avoid wasting too much time on it. To avoid wasting time on other management tasks, keep in mind that there are many other essential tools for restaurant owners to help manage recruitment, reservations, procurement, and more…

For example, when it comes to sourcing wine, Les Grappes Pro offers foodservice professionals direct access to a selection of winemakers who harvest their own grapes, while also providing guidance on how to create a wine list and select wines.

Discover Les Grappes Pro