Restaurant Stock Take Best Practices for South Africa

A stock take is only useful if it is accurate and consistent. Many South African restaurant operators do stock takes irregularly, rush through them before service, or record figures that are too rounded to be meaningful. The result is inventory data you cannot trust - and margins you cannot explain. Here is how to do it properly.

Set Up a Consistent Counting Process

The most important thing about a stock take is not the software you use or the time of day you do it - it is consistency. Run your stock take at the same time every week, with the same team, counting in the same order, using the same units. Consistency is what makes the data comparable between periods.

Divide your kitchen into zones: dry store, fridge, freezer, bar, front of house. Assign each zone to a specific person who is responsible for counting it every week. Use a printed or digital count sheet with pre-populated items and units - never let counters decide on units as they go.

Count before service or after close, never during. Partial deliveries mid-service, staff grabbing ingredients, and the general chaos of service all introduce errors. For weekly stock takes, close of business on Sunday or opening on Monday is the most common approach.

Measure With Precision

Round numbers are a red flag. If your count sheet shows 2 kg, 5 kg, and 10 kg for every ingredient, you are estimating rather than counting. Weigh proteins, dairy, and other high-cost items to the nearest 100 g. Count packaged goods by unit. Measure liquids by litre, using a measuring jug for open containers.

For items that arrive in bulk (a 25 kg bag of flour, for example), measure what has been used by weighing the remainder. A partially used bag of rice that gets recorded as “1 bag” every week tells you nothing.

Reconcile Against Sales and Purchases

A stock take figure on its own is meaningless without context. The value comes from reconciling:

Opening stock + purchases received − closing stock = usage

Compare that usage figure against your theoretical usage (calculated from your recipe costings multiplied by dishes sold). A significant variance - typically more than 3-5% - is worth investigating.

Common causes of variance include: delivery quantities that differ from invoices (check every delivery), prep waste above recipe yields, staff meals not being tracked, portioning inconsistencies, and in some cases, theft.

Use the Right Tools

Doing stock takes on paper and then manually entering figures into a spreadsheet creates transcription errors and is slow enough that operators often skip it. Restaurant stock control software that lets you count on a mobile device and automatically calculates variance against sales data saves time and improves accuracy significantly.

Brewster’s inventory management tools are built for exactly this workflow - count, reconcile, and review in one place, without spreadsheets. For multi-location operators, it aggregates across all sites so you can see your total stock position at a glance.

Start with a clean, well-structured count sheet. Be disciplined about timing and units. Review your variances every week. The insights compound over time.