u/OptimysticPizza

I work in a restaurant group with over 300 employees, an outside HR management firm AND two salaried employees whose role is for people management but they still have chefs, directors and outlet managers responsible for chasing down and inputting all their personal info and receiving/uploading Id's and SS cards. is this normal? Seems like chefs and managers should be able to send an email or fill out a form with basic contact info, job role, and pay rates then HR or the internal office people should chase down the new hire docs.

Are you guys having to do all this? Am I crazy for thinking this should not be something already overworked floor level managers should not have to do?

One of the properties I manage is a bat with a 40% alcohol mix. Not quite a sports bar, but we have tvs and are leaning a little into football. Upper management decided to open up at noon to catch folks who want to watch the 1pm(PST) games. Wondering if it's worth opening 2 hours earlier to capture the full spectrum of football watchers (as well as the brunch crowd). Once the weather cools off, we have a huge amount of patio space and 2 bars with plenty of comfortable viewing angles. I just feel like we're doing a half measure by not opening a couple hours earlier to be the definitive place for people to watch ball. I don't want them thinking of somewhere else anytime their team is playing at 10am.

For those who play sports in their restaurants, what's your experience? Any tips for capturing the football crowd?

FYI we're not in a place with a definitive sports team nearby. Rams are the closest team but the crowd here is generally from all over and the locals seem to pick their teams arbitrarily

Do you guys count every single thing every month? Like in addition to the obvious proteins, produce, dry goods, and such, do you count Bulk prep, paper goods, spices, salt, chemicals, etc?

I've taken over a new position and our inventory systems need work, to say the least. I've talke to other chefs and have seen instances where they do less orthodox systems and I'm wondering what other peoples' experiences are like.

For instance, one Exec Chef friend worked at a club with multiple outlets and they pretty much gave him a 30 day run where he didn't have a food cost budget, then they just didn't run starting/ending inventory after that.

I've seen other instances where folks just count big ticket or most common items, often more frequently.

I just feel like it's somewhat of a wasted effort to count every single thing every month, especially if its something that is inexpensive and low variance. Like counting takeaway consumables makes sense to me, but maybe we don't need to inventory toilet paper unless there's a sudden spike in spend or something. Spices are another big one, at least in terms of granularity. Count the saffron and vanilla beans, but do we need to count the ground cumin if we always have .5-1 container of it on hand?

I'm particularly looking at this through the lens of multi property management that has a high amount of variability in terms of what we order, mainly because we have a big catering operation that does one-off all the time and many of our restaurants have frequent menu changes. We use xtrachef and R365, and the amount of time it takes to map every single item correctly so that the inventory count is even accurate is almost a full time job.

Thoughts?