How to Take Restaurant Inventory (Without Losing Your Night)

Inventory is how food cost stops being a guess: COGS = beginning inventory + purchases − ending inventory. Miscount the ending number and everything upstream of it is wrong. Here's how working kitchens make the count fast and right.

Count shelf-to-sheet, not sheet-to-shelf

Order the count sheet the way the shelves are laid out — walk-in left-to-right, then freezer, then dry storage — and walk it in one pass. Hunting alphabetically around the kitchen (“where's the arborio?”) doubles the time and produces skips. If your storage layout changes, the sheet changes.

Fix your count units before you start

Decide, per item, whether you count cases, units, or pounds — and what a partial looks like (half a case of #10s = 3 cans, not “0.5”). A case of 25 lb flour counted as “1” when the sheet expects pounds is a 24-lb error from one line. This is the single biggest source of garbage counts.

The rules that keep the number honest

• Same day, same time, every period — after close or before deliveries.
• Count everything or nothing: opened bottles, the sauce in the bain, the case on the dock.
• Two people: one hands and eyes, one pencil. It's twice as fast and self-checking.
• No receiving during the count. A delivery mid-count corrupts the whole period.

Then actually use it

The count is only worth the night if it becomes numbers: period COGS, food cost against the healthy band, and variance — the gap between what you should have used (sales × recipe costs) and what you did use. Variance above ~2% is waste, portioning drift, or shrinkage, and it has an address.

Freecost's mobile app runs the walk on your phone — count sheets in shelf order, in your buy units, totals computed as you go. The two-hour clipboard night becomes forty minutes.