How Ottawa Venues manages inventory, food costs, and reporting with WISK
3x
Faster Inventory Time
10x
Faster Menu Engineering
Instant
COGS Provided
Susan MacLeod: Consistency would probably be our #1 problem before WISK. We used a variety of different products, various levels of complicated software, excel sheets, all the typical things that restaurants go through and we really needed something that would be user-friendly.
We know that all our employees work on a supercomputer that they walk around with in their hand, so that was important for us to have something that everybody had easy access to.
"Yes, I would always recommend it because we use both the food and the alcohol inventory. And as we know bars and nightclubs are very difficult to control."
It was very hard to justify investments because we had been through so many other products over the years that we’ve been doing this.
We know that inventory and labor costs are the two things that we have to pay the most attention to.
So you know getting the mindset around that everybody was comfortable to learn a new software. Cause everybody’s like, oh no; here we go again, another new product.
And WISK was so easy to implement and our employees are able to use their cell phones with it made the decision that much easier.
What’s great about WISK for us was that normally our software came up with the counts and the percentages and everything then it went to accounting or it went to me and sometimes to the managers.
But the managers always got it after the fact a hard copy. With WISK we can give them access and they can see it in real time.
So they’re accountable for their inventory, and the inventory person that’s doing it. It’s real-time information that’s very easy to look at and understand and it keeps them accountable.
"Consistency would probably be our number one problem before WISK. We used a variety of different products,..., all the typical things that restaurants go through and we really needed something that was going to be super user-friendly. "
Inventory time is always a win for us on the management side, because it gives us obviously the information to know if our business or our sales are successful or not.
What’s great about WISK is that when the chefs or the managers would hand in their cost projections on new items and new products it might not have been real-time information.
And by the time we reviewed it and approved it, and put it on a menu, then you go to print and all those things, the costs were often very different.
With WISK, it’s updated all the time.
So even if it does take us a month to implement new products, we can see the percentages at the time, across all the time periods.
So maybe at the end it’s not worth it, maybe it’s an off season product that suddenly became super expensive a month later.
"It was very hard to justify investments because we had been through so many other products over the years that we've been doing this. We recommend WISK to any kind of restaurant, full service, sit down, nightclubs, lounges, you know, we've managed them all. "
Yes, I would always recommend it because we use both the food and the alcohol inventory. And, as we know, bars and nightclubs are very tough to control.
There’s all kinds of tricks up the sleeves. Good people make bad decisions all the time and this stacks that in our favor so they can no longer bring in alcohol. We will see overages right away if it’s not part of the order. So it helps with controlling bad decisions.
It’s great for nightclubs and our food side obviously. The integration with our suppliers, GFS and Summit and there’s a couple of other companies that you integrate with real-time information. We don’t have to look for paper invoices it’s checked off right then and there.
And we get the food costs whenever we want them or not monthly or bi-weekly, we can log in and see them all the time.
We recommend WISK to any restaurant, full service, sit down, nightclubs, lounges, you know, we’ve managed them all. In our portfolio we have high end. We have fast food, we have pubs, and we have nightclubs and WISK works very well across all our venues.
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