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Table of Contents
- 1 What is a bar inventory app?
- 2 What makes a good bar inventory app ?
- 3 Benefits of inventory management software
- 4 Top 10 apps to manage your bar inventory
- 4.1 1. Rapid Bar App
- 4.2 2. Partender
- 4.3 3. Bar Cop
- 4.4 4. Bar Patrol
- 4.5 5. BevSpot
- 4.6 6. Barkeep
- 4.7 7. Wisk
- 4.8 8. BarDog
- 4.9 9. Craftable
- 4.10 Craftable helps you count your inventory using your mobile phone in under 20 minutes. Once the inventory is done, you can make orders from your suppliers and track your invoices by scanning them and uploading them to the software. The reports provided by the app help you calculate your bar costs, sales and determine your profit margins.
- 4.11 10. Accubar
- 4.12 Accubar uses a barcode scanner technology to allow bar managers to use their smartphones or tablets to count inventory with their system. The app offers customization options so that managers can tailor the app to meet their specific needs.
Managing a bar or a restaurant is not an easy job. In fact, managers have to juggle multiple responsibilities at once to keep the business thriving and one of the most important and time-consuming tasks is bar inventory. For many businesses in the hospitality field, managing bar inventory is crucial to the success of the company as alcoholic beverages account for a significant amount of both revenues and costs.
Doing bar inventory ensures you have the right amount of alcohol at the right time while helping you evaluate your business performance by tracking which items sell and which don’t. It also helps you analyze your daily costs, profits and losses to be able to adjust your inventory in the future and improve the way you order.
However, bar inventory is not the most exciting task for bar managers, the process tends to be quite long, repetitive and prone to mistakes if done manually. That’s why people who are looking for a way to simplify bar inventory management and make it a more pleasant experience turn to bar inventory apps.
Choosing the best and most efficient beverage inventory app can be a very confusing and difficult process since they are so many. To help you, we’ve listed the top 10 best bar inventory apps.
What is a bar inventory app?
A bar inventory app is a mobile app that is made specifically to help you manage and control your bar inventory. You can download it on your smartphone or tablet in order to have easy access to an automated inventory process for your business. These bar inventory apps streamline the inventory-managing process as well as analyze and assess your bar sales and finances, which makes your job more efficient and less time consuming.
Some common features of bar inventory apps include:
- The ability to automatically count inventory across two or more devices
- Effective methods to measure inventory such as a Bluetooth scale
- Automatic invoicing and ordering
- Full access to historical data
- Daily sales report and detailed inventory variance reports for individual products
Get personalized recommendations on bar and restaurant inventory management.
What makes a good bar inventory app ?
When looking for the best bar inventory app, there are some key features to look out for in order to obtain satisfactory results such as:
Bluetooth scale
For an accurate inventory, it is important for the app to have an integrated Bluetooth scale as it will allow you to move along your inventory quickly and easily with just your phone or/ tablet and scale.
Barcode scanner
One of the most basic yet important characteristics that any bar inventory app should have is a barcode scanner that allows you to quickly access information about any bottle. Your liquor inventory app should allow you to scan bottles from your smartphone or tablet in order to access information in real-time.
Direct POS integration
Integrating your inventory app with your POS system allows you to pull relevant sales data directly from the system and connect it with the available data you gathered from your inventory. This feature is a huge time saver and gives reliable and accurate information.
Access to databases
With your bar inventory app, you should have the ability to access data about brands and types of alcohol to choose from for your purchase orders. The data should be rich in information to make the process smoother and more efficient.
Availability offline and on multiple devices
The inventory app is here to create solutions and not additional problems, so while mediocre apps don’t work when there is no service or when multiple devices are connected, a good bar inventory app gives you the possibility to work offline and automatically refreshes and updates information when multiple employees are working on the inventory at the same time.
Benefits of inventory management software
Investing in a bar inventory software is an important business decision and one that has many advantages. In fact, when inventory apps are used correctly, they can help you save time, money and energy. Plus, they give a boost to your business by optimizing sales, supply orders and inventory ordering.
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Reduce errors
When you do your inventory manually, mistakes and inaccuracies are inevitable. But with an inventory app at hand human errors, miscalculations or dishonest behavior like employee theft are no longer an issue.The app is in charge of doing the relevant calculations and providing you with a real-time status of your inventory and profit.
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Save valuable time
Doing inventory manually is a long, repetitive and complicated process, which takes up a lot of valuable time. Time that could be invested in value-added tasks. With a bar management software, you can stop counting and copying numbers on your spreadsheet, the app automatically enters inventory counts into the software and integrates it with the rest of your systems.
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Reduce costs
Doing bar inventory manually results in many long unnecessary working hours, which eventually cost extra money. Using software reduces labor costs immensely in the long run. Moreover, it gives you accurate up-to-date information about your spending, inefficient orders, over ordering, excessive free drinks, etc. This way you have a clear idea of where to cut unnecessary costs and how to avoid losses.
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Optimize sales
Bar inventory apps play a huge role in identifying areas of waste and give valuable data on important matters such as spillage. By doing so, they help you determine business opportunities to create promotions on best-sellers and also help you prevent rush orders.
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Inventory tracking in real-time
Another advantage of bar inventory apps is that they allow you to track your liquor in real-time. You basically just need to pick up your mobile phone, open the app and look at your stock usage and sales. The report gives you information about your customer’s preferences, when a special beverage can go out of stock, an accurate estimation of your future needs and more.
Top 10 apps to manage your bar inventory
1. Rapid Bar App
RapidBar app is an inventory mobile app that allows bars and restaurants to evaluate their real costs, speed up the inventory process, make purchase orders, and analyze business costs, all in one place.
This 100% paperless app features a scanner and Bluetooth scale to measure inventory par levels efficiently. It also automatically and instantly provides you with detailed inventory variances, imports new products from the database, extends POS inventory systems and automates invoices to suppliers. RapidBar inventory app is here to make your life easier by saving you time and money so that you can focus on delivering an outstanding customer experience and make your business flourish.
2. Partender
Partender is a bar inventory app that focuses on speed and allows you to complete your bar inventory in just 15 minutes. The app works by displaying virtual bottles and allowing you to tap the screen at the alcohol level in each bottle. It then determines the exact level of liquor you still have in your bar stock.
The app’s features include analytical reports, multiple devices or users but also ordering bottles by matching liquor with the right supplier. You just need to create reports, download the purchase orders and forward them to your distributors.
3. Bar Cop
Bar Cop as its name states, was originally founded to protect bars from employee theft. But now, it offers a variety of features to reduce inventory time, address sales problems and, of course, deal with dishonest behavior.
The app is made to follow up and manage the inventory process from beginning to end. It will track your liquor from the moment it’s received until it’s consumed. Inventory management is fast and accurate and uses either a USB scale or your voice to enter par-level information. With Bar Cop, you can also make real-time orders based on your historical invoices or the inventory count at the time.
4. Bar Patrol
Bar Patrol is both a mobile app and online inventory management system that mainly targets mid-sized bars, due to its simplicity and ease of use. The app helps you manage your bar inventory efficiently thanks to stock count, fast ordering and invoices, POS integration, a Bluetooth scale and much more.
After downloading the app, you can measure the level of alcohol in bottles by using the Bluetooth scale system. It also allows you to track liquor usage by creating reports on variances and determining if the amount poured by your employees is the same.
5. BevSpot
BevSpot is an online app that is made for businesses that handle not only alcoholic beverages but also food inventories. It contains a comprehensive list of features that allow you to track orders, view sales data, uncover and analyze profits and more. Through its easy-to-use dashboard, the app also offers the option to organize your liquor bottles following their location on bar shelves, further cutting the amount of time you spend on the inventory process.
6. Barkeep
Barkeep is a versatile inventory software with a simple and easy-to-use interface. In fact, the app gives you the option to take inventory by case, bottle or weight, making it suitable for your specific needs. You are invited to use your smartphone camera to scan barcodes that then match an online database of products. The reports provided by the app allow you to get insights on your liquor usage as well as your pour costs. The platform can also be used by multiple users or devices.
7. Wisk
Wisk is a multi-purpose and versatile inventory app. Its variety of features allow you to weigh bottles on a Bluetooth scale, order bottles from large databases, cut waste, optimize drink prices, analyze data, estimate future sales, etc. Equipped with machine learning capabilities, the app helps you determine what you need to improve future sales, increase your bottom line and overall make your business more successful.
8. BarDog
The BarDog inventory software is very simple to use, the app directly matches the liquor you have with the data in the app by gathering items together and updating the information whenever there is a new purchase or order coming in.
BarDog allows you to track and manage your stock while giving you accurate inventory detailed reports. The app can also be used by multiple users at a time, saving you time on the whole inventory process.