Inventory is where cash quietly hides — on shelves, in the walk-in, in the trim bin. Good inventory management isn't about a perfect count; it's about a repeatable rhythm that turns four numbers into control: counts, par levels, variance, and waste. This guide walks through each, with the process a real operator can run this week.
Counting and reconciling by hand keeps the shelves honest — and eats your evenings. Let Lowboy carry the counts and the math, so more of your day belongs to the food and your people.
Food is your biggest controllable expense, and inventory is the ledger that tracks it. Do it well and you know your true food cost, catch leaks early, order the right amount, and free up cash that would otherwise sit rotting on a shelf. Do it poorly — or not at all — and you're flying blind: over-ordering, running out mid-service, and eating waste you never see. The four pillars below are the whole discipline.
A consistent physical count of what's on hand — the raw data everything else depends on.
The right amount to keep on hand, so you order to a target instead of a hunch.
Used vs. should-have-used — the map that shows you where product disappears.
Everything else is built on the count, so make it fast and consistent. A few habits separate a reliable count from a useless one:
Once you have quantities, value the count — multiply each quantity by its current unit price — to get the dollar value of inventory on hand. That value feeds directly into your COGS and food cost percentage.
A par level is the amount of an item you want on hand to cover demand until your next delivery, plus a small safety buffer. Instead of eyeballing the walk-in and guessing, you order back up to par each cycle. A simple way to set one:
If you use about 8 cases of chicken a week and get two deliveries a week (roughly 3–4 days apart), your par for a delivery cycle is around 4 cases plus a buffer for a busy weekend. Order enough to bring you back to par, no more. Pars aren't set-and-forget — retune them as your sales and seasons shift. Try the par level calculator to work yours out.
Good pars do two jobs at once: they stop over-ordering (cash tied up on the shelf, feeding spoilage) and they stop stockouts (lost sales, 86'd dishes, emergency supplier runs at a premium).
Variance is the gap between what you actually used and what you should have used. Your counts tell you actual usage; your sales tell you theoretical usage (each dish sold consumes a known recipe amount). Compare them:
A worked example for one item over a week:
Two pounds over isn't alarming; a consistent 10–15% variance is. Large variance points to over-portioning, waste, spoilage, comps, or theft — and because you're tracking it per item, you know exactly where to look instead of guessing across the whole kitchen. Variance is the single most powerful number in inventory management because it turns "food cost is high" into "the burger station is over-portioning."
Not all loss is theft or portioning — a lot is simply waste, and most kitchens never measure it. Keep a waste log at each station: what was thrown out, how much, and why (spoiled, over-prepped, dropped, trimmed, comped). Even a rough tally reveals patterns fast — the prep item you make too much of, the perishable you over-order, the garnish nobody finishes. Pair the log with FIFO rotation (first in, first out) so older product gets used before it expires. The full playbook is in how to reduce food waste.
Inventory management is a discipline most kitchens can't sustain by hand — the sheets, the math, the variance no one has time to chase. Lowboy is the sous-chef that keeps it running. You snap your counts, invoices and menu, and it turns them into pars, variance and waste flags automatically — computed from your numbers, never guessed — without changing how your team works.
It's POS-agnostic — connect Square today (Clover and Toast coming), or just snap it; the manual lane works the same. One flat $149/mo (or $1,490/yr — two months free), whole crew, 30-day money-back. Start with the free par level calculator, or run the audit on your actual counts and invoices.
Do the math: a kitchen spending about $50,000 a month on food that trims that by just 1% saves roughly $500 a month — about 3.4× the $149 plan. One caught price hike or one re-priced dish usually clears it.
Add the hours back, too — no spreadsheet nights, no manual invoice entry, no rebuilding the prep list when the menu changes.
Less time on the back office, more time on the food, your crew, and the reason you opened.
Get your free audit →