Orderbird vs. BarBrain – Which Solution Is Better for Your Inventory?

Orderbird excels as a POS system with simple service operation, but reaches its limits when it comes to stocktaking. BarBrain, by contrast, is not a POS system but a specialised inventory app that fills precisely this gap. The overview shows: BarBrain enables faster counting, precise results and automatic reports, whilst Orderbird falls back on manual processes for inventory without extensions.

Practical Comparison: Inventory in Hospitality and Hotels

How do these differences play out in practice? Let us imagine two scenarios:

• Inventory in a bar/restaurant (Orderbird): The bar manager uses Orderbird for daily sales but has to fall back on Excel lists for the monthly inventory. After closing, stock lists are printed or quantities noted with pen and paper. Opened bottles are estimated, as Orderbird has no specific function for quantity capture. Afterwards, the figures must be manually typed into a spreadsheet and evaluated. This double work step – first noting, then transferring – costs a great deal of time and harbours error sources. Counting and calculating often continues late into the night, making inventory an unpopular marathon task.
  
  
• Inventory in a bar/restaurant (BarBrain): The team uses BarBrain directly at the storage location on a smartphone or tablet. Every item is captured straight in the app – whether by tapping a plus/minus button or via a slider for the fill level of opened bottles. Two staff members can work in parallel: one counts in the bar area, the other in the stockroom, both in the same shared stock list. Thanks to real-time synchronisation, all entries merge immediately. A bottle of wine half full? Simply set it to “0.5” via the slider rather than guessing. At the end of the count, BarBrain automatically generates a finished inventory report with all totals, variances from the previous month and stock values. The 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 paper-based methods.
  
  

Industry-specific benefits: In chain restaurants and hotels, where inventories regularly take place across multiple areas (bar, kitchen, housekeeping), the difference becomes even more pronounced. Orderbird as a POS captures sales but does not cover all product categories – e.g. hotel consumables (minibar, housekeeping) cannot be inventoried there at all. BarBrain enables a cross-departmental stocktake of the entire range: from spirits and wine to food items and cleaning supplies. A hotel manager can use BarBrain to count all storage locations – restaurant, bar, room minibars and utility stores – in a single app. The individual storage structure is mapped one-to-one in BarBrain, ensuring no item is overlooked. The result: full transparency across all stock, without the laborious merging of different lists from various departments.

Furthermore, BarBrain is manufacturer-independent. Businesses using Orderbird as their POS can deploy BarBrain as a complementary tool for inventory without giving up their familiar POS environment. Inventory data can be exported from BarBrain and incorporated into Orderbird’s stock management export or accounting, for example. This way, BarBrain combines practical counting assistance with existing systems rather than replacing them.