Coffee Shop Monthly Expenses: Ways To Reduce Your Operations

Many small coffee shops only make a 10% profit from sales, and most of this goes toward overhead costs, debts and tax. Reducing your coffee shop monthly expenses can help expand this slim profit margin.

There are roughly over 20,000 cafes and coffee shops across Australia, and the market is growing every year. While more shops are popping up across the country, the fail rate for cafes is still extremely high within five years of opening.

Why did these shops close? Being unprepared for business ownership was the top reason. The industry is complex, and owners need to know how to manage staff, market their business, and balance their budget.

Your coffee shop monthly expenses will play a significant role in staying profitable. Without a watchful eye, your inventory costs can skyrocket, and your credit card processing fees may cut into your profit.

How to keep your expenses low

We thought of four creative ways to reduce your expenses and make your restaurant more competitive. While you may not be able to implement all of these options, nearly all coffee shops can introduce at least one of these changes.

Boost natural lighting

Coffee shops open early and close late, so the lights and machines are always on. Minimising how much power your shop uses can heavily decrease your coffee shop monthly expenses. The machines have to stay on to keep the coffee flowing, but you should try to keep the light switches turned off.

Allowing more natural light to enter your cafe will reduce your expenses. Danpal Light Architecture suggests that daylighting — the practice of using natural light — can reduce 75% of the energy used for lighting buildings and reduce cooling costs. In addition to the financial benefit, using natural light is an eco-friendly solution that will help the environment and draw in conscientious guests.

But even more interestingly, sunlight is correlated with many health benefits. It’s linked to serotonin production and may cause people to feel happier and energetic.

Do away with unsold inventory

Some coffee shops sell food, coffee beans, and kitchen supplies. One interesting take on this is the Tchibo model. The Germany coffee chain offers new non-coffee products each week, such as electronics, clothing, and furniture.

While offering these items can boost your coffee shop’s bottom line, unsold inventory can become a nightmare. Dead inventory sits on your shelves and does not get sold. If you’re not tracking your sales accurately, you might re-order more of these items and end up with a surplus of unwanted goods.

A surplus of dead stock can result in:

• Less room in your inventory
• Capital tie-up
• Risk of theft since workers know the goods won’t be missed

Your coffee shop can eliminate unwanted inventory by taking inventory and cross-checking sales records. The Epos Now Cafe POS solution lets you do this in a matter of minutes. Because all data is saved on the cloud, you can access your reports and manage your coffee shop from anywhere in the world.

Integrate your EFTPOS payments with your Point of Sale (POS) system

With the growing costs incurred to small business owners, it is important to recognise ways in which you can streamline processes, reduce costs and keep customers happy. One way of doing this is to integrate your EFTPOS machine with your POS system.

Tyro EFTPOS directly integrates with Epos Now, offering a seamless integrated EFTPOS solution which could save you time and money.

Epos Now and Tyro integrated EFTPOS benefits

• Reduced keying errors – Reduce costly keying errors and make end-of-day reconciliation simple and stress free.
• Integrated receipts – Give your customers one integrated receipt, with their invoice and EFTPOS details all in one.
• Enhanced contact management – Integrated EFTPOS can help to minimise the chances of your staff and customers encountering contaminated surfaces by reduced manual keying, handling of cash and receipts. This solution also assists in reducing customer wait times, which helps in adhering to the social distancing guidelines.

Put an end to shrinkage

Businesses often lose money without even realising it. One of the biggest causes of this loss is shrinkage. Investopedia defines shrinkage as, “the loss of inventory that can be attributed to factors such as employee theft, shoplifting, administrative error, vendor fraud, damage, and cashier error.”

If your cafe’s cashiers handle large amounts of cash, they can possibly skim a little off the top here and there. Likewise, a messy, unorganised stockroom is primed for theft since no one will notice a few items that go missing.

With Epos Now, all workers are assigned a user role and must log in before using the till. If an anomaly occurs, you can see who was working at that time and pursue the matter. You always have an accurate inventory with the system. Not only will you know how many boxes are left in the stockroom, but you can also track how much coffee is available behind the counter. Our system can even track down to the remaining grams of beans left in an open bag beside your grinder!

Get started today

Call us today to find out how we can help your business to succeed.

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