Managing your liquor inventory sucks. It’s time consuming, tedious, and it’s the last thing your employees want to do. In this new age of bars and restaurants, there are many solutions. Some options try to simplify inventory, but if they only solve part of problem you’re left with an incomplete picture of what’s happening in your bar. In order to be successful any inventory system has to completely check 5 major boxes:
- Must Be Accurate
- Count Full Bottles
- Real-Time Information
- Eliminate Unnecessary Labor
- Never Interfere With The Customer Experience
Choosing a new liquor inventory system shouldn’t be as hard as doing inventory itself. Thankfully there is an easy choice. There are a few different competitors that take a stab at making inventory easy, but none cover every base effectively. BarMinder does.
One solution is timing or angle detecting pour spouts to track inventory. These spouts attempt to recognize how long a bottle is tipped over and guess based on time how much liquor has been poured basically by counting. They’re not actually measuring what’s leaving the bottle, only guessing, which makes them inaccurate. These spouts also have very large strange designs which look nothing like normal speed pourers which can interfere with the customer experience.
BarMinder’s Smart Spouts look just like regular speed pourers so they don’t interfere with your customer’s experience.
Ultrasonic pourers try to measure how much is poured in a different way. They work like car parking sensors, bouncing a signal from the spout until it hits the surface of liquor inside the bottle. The biggest issue here is that every bottle is shaped differently. If they haven’t seen a particular liquor before, they can’t measure it. Measuring a particular pour is also really difficult and they have to average out measurements across multiple pours, so catching a heavy handed bartender is nearly impossible.
Both of these other pourers depend on the correct spout to be put on the correct bottle. If the wrong spout is paired to the wrong bottle, your data is essentially garbage.
No other method provides actual counts of how many full bottles are in storage, they guess based on how much they think has been poured out front. When the system isn’t tracking full bottles, those will still need to be counted manually. On top of that, inventory still needs to be manually inputted once that process is complete, so how much time have you really been saving?
“How much time have you really been saving?”
Apps, scales and pen & paper share many of the same problems. Although apps allow you to skip a step in the pen & paper process, the both of them still tend to be incredibly inaccurate, labor intensive, and have no tracking capabilities. You have to manually review all your invoices from your liquor suppliers to figure out how much you bought, and you’re still only getting a snapshot once a week – with no way of figuring out where things went wrong. So, what else is out there that solves all of the above issues?
Centered on a wireless liquor pour spout, The BarMinder System tracks every bottle from when it enters the establishment until it goes into the trash. By combining data from the spouts about every drop being poured with real-time counts of every bottle in storage, BarMinder lets you never have to count another bottle of liquor. Ever. Just slap a sticker to the neck of the bottle, check it into the system and your complete inventory and usage is provided to you on the hub in your location or anywhere in the world on your phone.
No more incorrect counts, no more hours wasted on counting bottles. You and your staff can focus on caring for customers and BarMinder will let you know when there’s something that can be done to make more money. Reduce shrinkage, reduce overhead and make more money with BarMinder.
