Food cost control database recommendations

[cadmium]

The restaurant that I work for is about to open a new branch, and I'm going to the new location where I'll be handling the orders and inventory. I'd like to update the way we keep these records as everything is in a jumble of messy excel documents, some of which have errors, some of which just aren't updated. Since I come from a computer background and have a good bit of experience with creating custom, scripted MS Access databases, I've offered to make a new one.

However since I won't always be at this restaurant to fix the database or other people's mistakes, it might be best if we went with a pre-existing solution. So I'm wondering if any of you pros have any recommendations or positive or negative experience with restaurant cost control software.

I'd like it to be stable, well supported, have a clean interface which ideally is touchscreen friendly for walking around doing inventory, be able to import POS sales and maybe labor data, and have powerful reports and graphing abilities.

Thanks

 

[jwill]

Most decent point of sale systems have an integrated cost control system. I've worked with Aloha, Micros, and a couple small regional companies. Aloha's was the best that I have experienced, but it's uneccessarily expensive. I would suggest looking into systems online. Find one that suits your needs and ask the company for demo software. Most of them should have it available. You may not be able to do much with the inventory side of the programming, but you can probably gleem enough information from the basic operations to know if the cost control system will be adequate. As with most things, they're pretty standard across the board, it will most likely be a matter of personal preference.

 As far as inventory/ordering goes, that's always been manual, and served as a check/balance system to the computer's numbers.