Orderbird vs. BarBrain - Which solution is better for your inventory?

Orderbird convinces as a POS system with simple operation in service, but reaches its limits when it comes to stocktaking. BarBrain, on the other hand, is not a POS system, but a specialized inventory app that fills precisely this gap. An overview shows that BarBrain enables faster counting, precise results and automatic reports, while Orderbird falls back on manual processes for stocktaking without extensions.

Practical comparison: stocktaking in the restaurant and hotel industry

So how do these differences play out in practice? Let's imagine two scenarios:

• Inventory in a bar/restaurant (Orderbird): The bar manager uses Orderbird for daily sales, but has to use Excel lists for the monthly inventory. After closing time, he prints out stock lists or writes down the stocks with pen and paper. Opened bottles are estimated, as Orderbird has no specific function for recording quantities. The figures then have to be manually typed into a table and evaluated. This double step - first note down, then transfer - takes a lot of time and is a source of error. Counting and calculating often continues late into the night, making stocktaking an unloved marathon task.
  
  
• Inventory in a bar/restaurant (BarBrain): The team uses BarBrain directly at the storage location on a smartphone or tablet. Each item is recorded directly in the app - either by tapping a plus/minus button or using a slider for the fill level of opened bottles. Two employees can work in parallel: one counts in the counter area, the other in the warehouse, both in the same shared stock list. Thanks to real-time synchronization, all entries flow together immediately. A bottle of wine half full? Simply enter it exactly as "0.5" using the slider instead of guessing. At the end of the count, BarBrain automatically creates a finished inventory report with all totals, differences from the previous month and stock values. Laborious typing and recalculating is completely eliminated - as are human errors. The entire inventory is completed in a fraction of the time, often more than twice as fast as with paperwork.
  
  

Industry-specific advantages: The difference becomes even clearer in the restaurant and hotel industry, where regular inventories are carried out in several areas (bar, kitchen, housekeeping). Orderbird as a cash register records sales, but does not cover all product groups - e.g. consumables in hotels (minibar, housekeeping) cannot be inventoried at all. BarBrain enables a cross-departmental inventory of the entire product range: from spirits and wine to food items and cleaning products. A hotel manager can use BarBrain to count all storage locations - restaurant, bar, minibars in the rooms and service stock - in one app. The individual warehouse structure is mapped one-to-one in BarBrain so that no item is forgotten. The result: full transparency across all stocks, without the tedious merging of different lists from various departments.

BarBrain is also manufacturer-independent. Businesses that use Orderbird as a cash register can use BarBrain as a supplementary tool for stocktaking without having to give up their familiar POS environment. The inventory data can be exported from BarBrain and transferred to Orderbird's merchandise management export or accounting system, for example. BarBrain thus combines practical counting assistance with existing systems instead of replacing them.