Hotel with a restaurant: running POS, kitchen and inventory in one system

A restaurant or bar brings a hotel extra revenue, yet it is often the least controlled department. The reason is simple: rooms live in one program, the restaurant till in another, and stock in a notebook or Excel. Every manual hand-off between them is a place where money disappears.

Where the money leaks

• A guest dines and says "charge it to my room", but the bill never reaches their folio and is forgotten at check-out.
• A dish's price no longer covers its cost: ingredients went up, the menu didn't.
• Stock goes down, but nobody knows how much was used, how much spoiled and how much simply "went missing".
• No one compares how many portions the kitchen made in the morning with how many are left at night.

1. Charging restaurant bills to the room

When the restaurant POS and the hotel system are one, the waiter picks "charge to room" when closing the order and the amount lands on that guest's folio automatically. At check-out the guest sees and pays one bill for the stay, minibar and restaurant. Nothing is forgotten, and no paper runs between the front desk and the restaurant.

2. Orders reach the kitchen without paper

As soon as the waiter enters an order, it appears on the kitchen or bar screen. The cook sees which table ordered what and when, and marks the dish ready. Paper tickets don't get lost and the order queue stays in order.

3. Recipes and dish costing

Give every dish a recipe: which ingredients, how much of each, and how many portions it yields. The system then costs the dish at the real stock price of its ingredients. When ingredients get dearer, you immediately see which dishes stopped making money.

The key number is food cost: cost as a share of the selling price. Many restaurants aim to keep it around 25–35%. Above that, it's time to revisit the price, the portion or the supplier.

4. Inventory: receipts, transfers and write-offs

Stock control rests on three movements: receiving goods, transferring them from the store to the kitchen, and writing off spoiled or unusable products. When each movement is recorded as a document, you always know what's on hand and what it's worth.

• Receive supplier deliveries as documents — prices update automatically.
• Run kitchen transfers with a send and a receive step: shortages show up at once.
• Write off with a reason: expired, spoiled, lost in preparation.
• Get low-stock alerts so purchasing is never late.

5. Daily control

The kitchen logs what it produced and how much every day. At the end of the day stock movements, production and sales are reconciled in one report: how much came in, how many dishes were made, sold and written off. Responsible staff get the daily summary as a notification.

Numbers worth tracking

• Restaurant revenue by day and month, compared with the previous period.
• Average check and number of guests.
• Best-selling dishes and their cost.
• Sales by hour — for planning shifts.
• Write-off value and the number of low-stock items.

Summary

The most reliable way to control money in a hotel with a restaurant is to run rooms, restaurant, kitchen and inventory in one system. The guest's bill is then complete, dishes are costed at real prices and every stock movement is on record.

Smartel has all of it in one dashboard: restaurant POS with charge-to-room, a kitchen screen, recipes and costing, a production log, stock receipts, transfers, write-offs and low-stock alerts, plus restaurant and kitchen reports.