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HotSchedules launches restaurant inventory mobile app

Designed for independent and small regional restaurants, HotSchedules Count aims to help restaurants improve inventory accuracy, control foods costs, streamline ordering and eliminate the use of complex spreadsheets and paper-based processes.

July 22, 2015

HotSchedules, a provider of mobile technology for the restaurant and hospitality industries, has launched Count, a mobile application for smartphones, tablets and browsers that allows restaurants to count their on-hand inventory and queue orders for products that are below ideal quantities.

Designed for independent and small regional restaurants, HotSchedules Count aims to help restaurants improve inventory accuracy, control foods costs, streamline ordering and eliminate the use of complex spreadsheets and paper-based processes, the company said in an announcement.  

Food costs often have the leading impact on restaurant margins, accounting for between 25 and 38 percent of total operating cost, according to Steven Buckley of Demand Media, the announcement said. HotSchedules Count is intended to save small restaurants from the time drain and inaccuracies of manual inventory management.

Available on iOS and Android devices, HotSchedules Count enables restaurants to manage food and beverage inventory from a smartphone or tablet. Count’s drag-and-drop interface and its ability to import items from spreadsheets is designed to minimize setup time. Users can organize items by location and sub-location (e.g. freezer, dry storage, etc.), identify high-cost or high-loss items that needed to be counted more frequently, and set par levels for each product, the company said.  

Count can also be customized for individual restaurant to import catalogs from vendors anf ensure that all items and prices are accurate.

The Count interface supports multiple time frames (spot, daily, weekly and monthly), all common units of measurement, counting by location and the ability to count offline and sync the data later. In addition, users can review totals by category and location, compare on-hand inventory versus par, and queue up a purchase order by completing the count. The application can also export inventory lists or purchase orders to a spreadsheet and then email them to the user, the announcement said.