Is stocktaking essential?

Case study

A hotel in the East Midlands has 70 rooms, a 50-seat restaurant and a café-bar. The hotel has developed a good local reputation for its food - all the dishes for both the restaurant and the café are freshly prepared in house.

The current system for stocktaking has been in place for years, and involves a stocktake on the last day of every month, plus a major stocktake performed on 31 December and another at the end of the accounting season in April.

But, over the past few months, the members of staff who perform the stocktakes have voiced concerns that they are a waste of time best spent elsewhere.

The general manager has always firmly believed in regular, comprehensive stocktakes, mainly for the peace of mind they offer. But now he is wondering whether his staff might have a point - is the hotel's stocktaking procedure in need of a rethink?

Outsourcing the whole stocktaking procedure has always been dismissed as too expensive, so the hotel's chef, F&B controller and book-keeper still handle them. Of course, if any of the three are not available, they pass the responsibility on to one of their team.

The whole process can tie up these people's time for anything up to two days, and they claim that the cost of those man-hours is being wasted by producing a bottom-line figure that is intrinsically inaccurate.

Changes in staff mean stocktaking is performed slightly differently every time, and fresh food prices fluctuate daily, so this inaccuracy could be having a direct effect on the produced gross-food-profit figures.

The human element aside, monthly stocktakes have an inbuilt bug anyway - the lengths of months vary, the number of weekends in each month differ and some months have the added glitch of a bank holiday.

This case study is a work of fiction and consequently the names, characters and incidents portrayed in the article are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.