Automating Your Commissary

For restaurant groups with a central warehouse or commissary, the internal supply chain is often one of the most challenging parts of the business to manage.

Requests for inventory are sent via text or email, fulfillment is tracked on clipboards, and the accounting team is left buried in a mountain of manual inter-company invoices and transfer adjustments. As Linda Liu, Director of Finance at Impact Kitchen, puts it:

"We used to produce separate invoices for our commissary, then create a bill for each one. It was taking up a lot of time."

At COGS-Well, we believe managing your commissary and accurately adjusting product quantities and costs between locations should be easy and efficient, not an administrative burden. Here is how we’ve helped groups like Impact Kitchen, Ruby Slipper, and Café Ficelle turn their commissary operations into a "push-of-a-button" reality.

Simplify Commissary Ordering

With COGS-Well, the commissary is treated like a standalone supplier. Your restaurants can submit orders (transfer requests) to the commissary for both inventory and recipe items. The commissary receives a fulfillment alert immediately after a request is submitted.

For a restaurant manager, COGS-Well can also suggest the quantity of each item to request from the commissary based on on-hand levels, pars levels, and/or projected usage, reducing over-production at the commissary and waste at the restaurant.

Managers can enter their requests on any device with an internet connection – no more phone calls, texts, note pads, spreadsheets, or emails required – and the managers can place their orders when they have the time available. Emir Ayden, Director of Operations at Impact Kitchen, explains:

"We can place orders to the commissary as if it were a standalone supplier. We can request and fulfill transfers to and from the commissary and between our stores seamlessly."

Smart Fulfillment & Pick Accuracy

For Brenton Woodruff, COO of Café Ficelle, moving to COGS-Well solved the chaos of managing multiple restaurant locations and a commissary without a system.

Now, Brenton’s commissary team can simply open a transfer request and print a fulfillment worksheet to "pick" the request quickly and accurately. When fulfillment is completed, only changes to the request need to be entered. A digital alert is sent to the restaurant with a record of the fulfilled items and quantities.

“With COGS-Well, we are now using the inventory transfer features between the commissary and each of the restaurants. The managers place their orders as a transfer request, and the commissary receives alerts for transfers to be fulfilled, and that's super seamless,” Brenton shared. 

The Recipe-to-Inventory Logic

Perhaps the most unique advantage of COGS-Well’s commissary features is how it handles the identity of a product as it moves from the commissary to the restaurants.

In most systems, if a commissary sends 10 gallons of potato salad to a restaurant, the theoretical inventory usage tracking breaks down. This is because the commissary will use the raw ingredients in the recipe, while the restaurant will not – it only uses the finished product. COGS-Well solves this by automatically converting a Recipe Item to an Inventory Item.

How it works:

• At the Commissary: When a recipe item (like potato salad) is transferred out, COGS-Well automatically breaks down the recipe and depletes the raw ingredients (potatoes, mayo, seasoning) from the commissary’s stock. This ensures the theoretical usage and reordering alerts for the raw items are always accurate.

• At the Restaurant: The moment the transfer is sent from the commissary, that recipe automatically converts into a standalone inventory item. The restaurant manager doesn’t see a list of 10 ingredients; they just see potato salad on their count sheet, and COGS-Well now tracks the actual and theoretical usage of potato salad.

This dual-layer tracking allows the commissary and the restaurants to have an accurately calculated inventory on hand and theoretical vs. actual (TvA) variance analysis. The commissary tracks the ingredients for the Potato Salad while the restaurants track potato salad.

Accounting Sync: The Push of a Button

Adjustments to costs for each location, and manual inter-company billing for commissary transfers (or restaurant to restaurant transfers) are where most finance teams lose hours of productivity and worry about accuracy. When a transfer is completed in COGS-Well:

• Inventory quantity is updated at the restaurant and the commissary simultaneously.

• Costs are adjusted for each location.

• Transferred recipe items can be treated as inventory items at the restaurant.

• Cost adjustments can be exported to the General Ledger automatically.

As Linda Liu shared, her team is saving 3–4 hours every week through automatic adjustments to the GL:

"Instead of doing 20 entries, it's literally the push of a button. We have stopped manually updating transfer adjustments to our NetSuite General Ledger. The elimination of human error also makes the information more accurate.”

Total Cost Recovery: The Markup Strategy

For operators looking to recover more than just the product costs in their commissary, a powerful feature in COGS-Well is to account for the other overhead and/or labor.  A gallon of sauce doesn't just cost the price of the tomatoes; it costs the labor of the person who made it along with a portion of the overhead of the facility.

Jennifer Beougher, CFO of Ruby Slipper Restaurant Group, highlights this as a game-changer:

"The commissary uses the cost markup and labor markup features for items going to the restaurants so we can recover our true costs. The way we used to account for the commissary was a pain point and COGS-Well has eliminated the pain."

The Bottom Line: Total Visibility

By automating your commissary with COGS-Well, you will save your restaurant managers, your commissary team, and your accounting team a lot of time and effort. You can relax knowing that your COGS, on-hand quantities, and usage levels are always up to date across your entire enterprise. Accuracy will go from throwing horseshoes to being pinpoint. 

Is your commissary currently a pain point for your team? Let COGS-Well help you recover your true costs and reclaim your time.