One fact can hardly be disputed: Bar losses in the hospitality industry are out of control. Whether you're running a restaurant, bar, club, hotel or other beverage operation, it's a given that your profits are needlessly vanishing through the necks of all those colorful bottles. Consider:

• Studies have shown that bar pouring cost averages 25% across the industry. With a proper system, that number can easily be brought down to 20% or lower.

• Research by the Club Manager’s Assn. of America and the National Club Assn. found that 59% of country club F&B departments operate at a loss, while only 34% are in the black and 7% break even.

• For the average independent restaurant, F&B costs are the single greatest expense.

The challenge of every operator is how to put in effective bar controls, deter theft, and do so without increasing the load on an overworked management team. The way is well-known, but not easy: Thorough receiving and inventory processes, accurate purchasing, and timely, meaningful calculation of cost percentages and variances. Often they'll hope that a POS system can manage their liquor inventory, but they soon realize those are mainly food-oriented.

Many operators know the steps, but the amount of work required forces them to cut corners. That's where AccuBar can help. Our barcode-scanning PDAs drastically reduce the time it takes to manage your liquor inventory, wine inventory and other items. At every step in the beverage management process, AccuBar eliminates data entry and error points, and quickly feeds accurate data to its sophisticated back-end software. From there you can see a spike in your pouring cost for single-malt liquors, or notice the alert that you're missing 5 bottles of Grey Goose, or view your updated perpetual inventory, or determine the consumption and billing for a special event, or even spot-check a bartender's beverage cost for a particular shift.

These are just a few of the many ways AccuBar can revolutionize your beverage management process, and even help you with inventory of food, dry goods and other items. If you've looked at us before, click here to see the improvements we've made in Version 4.0. Or if you're just beginning your pursuit of a better way to manage your beverage department, follow the link to learn more.