Pen and paper vs. BarBrain - Which solution is better for your inventory?

Every criterion clearly shows that analog stocktaking with pen and paper offers hardly any advantages apart from the supposed cost savings. What you save in software fees, you often pay for in staff hours and stress. BarBrain uses the strengths of digitalization - speed, automation and data availability - to make stocktaking simpler and more reliable.

Practical comparison: stocktaking yesterday and today

Traditional stocktaking (pen & paper): A typical scenario in a bar: two employees are supposed to carry out the monthly inventory after work. They print out lists of all items or use paper forms. Then they split up - one counts the spirits at the bar, the other counts the crates in the warehouse. Each quantity found is noted down with tally sheets or numbers on the paper. For opened bottles, they try to estimate the fill level (e.g. note "half full"). After hours of counting, both meet up with a pile of notes. Now step two begins: all the figures have to be transferred to an Excel spreadsheet and added up. This is often not done until the next morning in the office because nobody can do it at night. The double work (first writing, then typing) costs additional time. There are plenty of sources of error: Perhaps the handwriting has been misinterpreted by a colleague, totals have been mistyped or you forget to include a slip of paper. Finally, an inventory list is handed over to the boss - without in-depth analysis, unless someone is still using pivot tables in Excel. No wonder that stocktaking is perceived as a burden in this way and is often postponed or only carried out carelessly.

Modern inventory (BarBrain): Now the same scenario with BarBrain: the two employees open the BarBrain app on a tablet and a smartphone. They log in to the prepared inventory - all the items in the establishment have already been created digitally. Employee A starts at the front of the bar: every bottle of spirits and every keg of beer is counted directly in the app. For full bottles, a tap on "+1" is all it takes, while he uses the smartphone slider to drag opened bottles to the estimated fill level - the app displays 0.5 for half full, for example, which is exactly half the bottle quantity. Meanwhile, employee B records the crates in the warehouse: with a few taps, he enters "white wine 0.75 l - 12 bottles", for example. Both can see the progress live in the app; items that colleague A has already counted are marked for B so that nothing is counted twice. After a short time, all areas have been counted. The inventory result is immediately available without any further action: BarBrain has already added up all the figures, calculated the stock value and created a PDF report. This also shows the differences to the previous month, as well as the shrinkage (loss) as a percentage, in case anything is missing. The two employees close the app and go home on time - there is no need to work overtime to update the data. The management receives the inventory report by e-mail from BarBrain or downloads it from the web interface. What used to be a feat of strength has become a routine task with BarBrain that takes little time and still delivers reliable figures.

"The ability to accurately measure opened bottles using the app is a game changer. Our stocktaking has not only become faster, but also more accurate." This practical report shows that the digital method is not only superior in theory, but also in practice.