Whether you own a large grocery store or smaller specialty market, grocery store management comes with a particular set of challenges unlike any other industry. Here are a couple common challenges that grocery store managers face, and how to fix them.

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Inventory Reconciliation

In a grocery store managing the volume of items you have in store is a major task. Additionally, when you get an order in, reconciling that against your available stock of items is an added challenge.

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Many times, grocery store owners go with one of three options. Either they skip over the task entirely, agree to put in hours upon hours of tedious labor with the entire staff having to come in early or work late, or hire an expensive reconciliation specialist.

The risk with skipping the process entirely is that if there is an issue with theft, low stock counts, irregularities on pricing, etc. you often don’t know that’s it’s a problem until you’ve already lost a considerable amount of revenue. And the last two are expensive and inefficient.

Using your grocery store pos system “doing Inventory” doesn’t have to be a scary phrase anymore. The process is made simpler with a data collector. The data collector comes into play when you add a new item to your inventory or get a new order of stock in from your vendors. You take the collector, scan one item’s barcode and the device relays the item name, item count, and barcode to a data file. Upload this file into your POS and it automatically updates all your counts for your items. Then whenever you look at your POS you get a real-time count of the inventory you have in stock.

Choosing your Scale

Managing the Meat/Deli/and Bakery Departments

Managing multiple departments is another challenge grocery store owners face. Many times these departments are run independently from the main retail side of grocery store operations. However, this method of keeping the departments separate can get inefficient very quickly.

The traditional way to manage the different departments is to have a customer go to one of the counters, the meat, deli or bakery department makes up an order rings up a price for the item, the customer waits for the item and takes the item with a label to the check-out counter and the item is rung up again and then the cashier processes check out.

This usually works fine, unless there is a hiccup along the way. A couple common problems grocery store managers face are; forgotten or abandoned items being left in the store aisles left to go bad, no communication or inventory tracking across departments, and catering orders in these departments are wholly left out of the process.

We’re turning to our POS again to help us out with this problem. With Cafe Cartel’s Grocery and Market Point of Sale you can have an employee make up an order from one department. And then pull the same order up on your check-out point of sale. This solution makes it possible for customers to place a sandwich order in the deli department, continue shopping the rest of the store and then simply tell the cashier their name to pull the order up upon checkout and they can grab the sandwich on their way out.

The benefit of only running the order process once makes your grocery store more efficient and allows you to have one central database to view inventory counts including all of your departments.

Catering Orders

Expanding your market to accommodate catering orders is a great revenue generator for your business. However, the multiple factors that catering orders entail, drives catering orders to still be done manually.

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Having one central database for all of your inventory, now makes it easy to keep track of all your orders, pick up times, deposits, etc. This eliminates the chance of error or miscommunication between departments. Now customers can put in a catering order in any department, it’s entered into the system along with a date for pick up and you can manage the order at any terminal.

    Cafe Cartel has all the features that you need for your Grocery Store POS
  • Simple Inventory Reconciliation
  • Integrated Deli Scales
  • Create Barcodes
  • Catering Management
  • Labor Scheduling

and much more!