Two Hours, a Pencil, and a Half-Empty Bottle of Vodka

I'm probably aging myself with this one. Back when I owned my restaurants, inventory meant an Excel sheet printed out from whatever computer was closest, a pencil scavenged from wherever a pencil could be found, and me walking the building hunting down every bottle. Half-full bottles are the worst part. You end up marrying them together to get an honest count, which I know you're not supposed to do, but you do what gets you an accurate number. Then you'd adjust your PARs on top of that, which is its own headache, because your PARs from last month aren't necessarily your PARs this month. Two to three hours of this, once or twice a week, every week, for years.

And that was only half the job. After the count came the orders. You'd sit down and call every vendor, one at a time, and walk through the order, and every single call turned into a small negotiation you didn't ask for. They'd pitch you on switching this to that, or that to this, and the whole time you're doing math in your head, wondering if swapping the well vodka saves you enough to be worth it. It's a lot of guessing dressed up as a system. I did it for years. A lot of operators still know this process well.

It's part of why I recruit the way I do, too. When you've actually lived the job, wasted the hours, made the guesses, you don't soon forget it. So when something exists that gets that time back, I pay attention.

AJ Rebuilt the Whole Thing

My husband is an absolute genius, and I don't say that lightly. We've had Chefsheet.com since 2012, and it's been steady and reliable for a lot of independent restaurants for over a decade. That's the part people forget about tools like this. They don't need to be exciting. They need to still be running for you a decade later, which most software in this space cannot say. But once AI made it possible to retool something like this much faster, he went and did it. These tools have gotten so much better over the last ten years, and he's got something like five AIs running upstairs, talking to each other, re-coding the whole thing and adding a stack of great new features. It's now called Countertop App, live in the app stores and at countertop-app.com on desktop.

Here's what it does. It pulls your menu straight off your website and uses it to seed your inventory list, so you're not starting from a blank sheet. Upload your invoices and it builds the rest of your sheets for you. It organizes everything by the twelve or so places you actually keep your stock, because if you've ever done inventory in a restaurant, you know it's never in one tidy spot. Counting happens by text, voice, camera or QR code instead of a pencil and a hopeful guess. And when you're ready to order, it emails your vendors directly. You never have to pick up the phone unless you want to.

The whole process, start to finish, takes thirty minutes or less. I walked through it with AJ myself, as a test, and that's exactly what it took.

This Is About the P&L, Not the App

This isn't really about the app. It's about what getting that time back does for your P&L.

When you're looking at your numbers as an owner, and you're watching labor costs climb the way they have been, cutting an hour and a half twice a week off a bartender's schedule adds up to money that matters. It's not a headline number. It's not going to fix your whole month, and it’s not going to eliminate someone’s job. But this savings accumulates across a year, and it's exactly the kind of small, unglamorous change that moves the needle on how a restaurant operates. I built five restaurants without a tool like this. I would have paid for it in the first month if I'd had the option.

I think about the phone calls the most, honestly. Not the counting. The counting was always going to take the time it took. It's the vendor calls that got me, the part where you're supposed to be running a business and instead you're playing defense against a sales pitch you didn't ask for, doing math in your head about well vodka while someone on the other end of the line is trying to upsell you on something you don't need or have the storage space for. That's not operating a restaurant. That's just friction, and it was built into the job for as long as I did it.

That's the thing nobody wants to talk about with technology in this industry. Nobody gets excited about inventory software. Nobody's dreaming about their QR code counting system. But the owners who win the next ten years aren't the ones chasing something flashy. They're the ones who find every one of these small, boring hours hiding in their week and take them back.

If you want to see it for yourself, it's live now at countertop-app.com, with more on it at www.countertop-app.com/blog. Everything on the site is accurate today, and we're still adding features as we go. Use code MADISON20 for 20% off your first year.

Retire the pencil. You've earned it.

About The Author:

Martha Madison is a Los Angeles-based hospitality recruiter who places leadership and management talent into restaurants, hotels, and private households. Before she ever placed a candidate, she built five restaurants from the ground up and put her own money and her own career on the line. That same operator's eye is why she and her husband, AJ, built Countertop App, the inventory and ordering tool she wished she'd had back when she was still doing counts with a pencil.

What if restaurant inventory took 30 minutes instead of three hours?

Restaurant inventory shouldn’t take hours every week. Countertop App helps operators count stock, manage inventory, and place vendor orders in 30 minutes or less.

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