How growyze Makes Ordering Stock “Easier Than Ordering on Amazon” for Whistle Punks

“My role in Operations means I’m involved in everything, from implementing marketing strategies, to project development on new sessions, hiring and people management and especially stock”, explains Jack.

This means Jack is engrossed in growyze on a daily basis; “ As an example I've been using growyze a lot recently because we're just starting a new menu change and a lot of that falls on me. So adding new prices and products, matching up everything with our POS Square, ensuring our COGs are on point and that we’ve got no wastage. It’s all really important and when I sit down with the Head of Operations and he asks me how's wastage, or how’s something else, growyze makes it a lot easier to find those figures and ensure we’re not down. If we are ever down, it’s really easy to spot in the system and locate where something’s gone wrong or what’s happened.” 

Prior to implementing growyze, like many venues, Whistle Punks used a Google Sheet to track and count stock which wasn’t an efficient process. As Jack explains; “We were using Google Sheets, which is flawed and prone to human error. I don't think we were tracking our COGS or if we were it wasn’t accurate and we weren’t tracking wastage. Luckily the business was a lot smaller back then but you can correlate the ramping up of the business to us using growyze more and more and I don’t know what we would have done without it”.

“I’ve used other stock management softwares before in previous jobs, normally integrated into the POS, and they're really tricky to use. They’re horrible to look at, whereas the UX of growyze is really good, it’s easier than using Amazon! Everything you do makes sense, you can easily add products to your cart to order, and even the more complicated features such as the GP analysis - it’s really critical information nicely presented.”

Using growyze to make stocktake and product ordering faster and easier

Whistle Punks perform a stocktake for each venue on a weekly basis for food and drink items, with an entire stocktake once per month for food, drink, merchandise and incidentals. 

While many venues use growyze’s barcode scanning feature, Whistle Punks uses the exportable stocksheets as their method of counting items. As Jack explains: “Instead of going around with a pen and paper tally marking which is confusing you now have a nice individual stocksheet for each part of the venue. So you can pre-fill this sheet of products that you would only find in one part of the bar, and then you could have a stocksheet for another part of the bar, plus one for the dry storage and that way you can send three people off at once because you can all log in and and contribute to different parts of the stocksheet which would contribute to the overall stocktake of that day.” This makes for a far faster overall count, as Jack shares “you could get it done in 20 minutes sometimes, it’s really quick.” 

The ease at which they can make supplier orders and rectify any issues also helps to increase efficiency. As Jack explains; “The automatic email system for supplier discrepancies is fantastic. Only yesterday we had a supplier send bottles of drinks when we’d ordered cans and it was as simple as checking on growyze to see what we’d ordered. You can then add a note to explain the issue and hit query which means it won't approve the delivery and it'll ping an email straight away to the supplier. Within 20 minutes we had a reply from the supplier apologising and saying they’d send a new delivery. It’s so simple and saves logging into your email and you can track it easily.”

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Managing multiple venues using growyze

Multi-site venue management was one feature highly requested by the Whistle Punks team. “The new multi-site management feature is so, so useful” says Jack. “I’ve got access to the main Whistle Punks account which is my operational account and I can assign products to venues with a click of a button all in one sheet and I can de-assign and delete over the whole company. All of which has just streamlined the whole process massively.”

If a venue appears to have performed better or worse on a certain week, growyze’s reporting and analytics dashboards also help Jack to pinpoint any performance issues; “GP analysis is useful when I’m setting new recipes up, then the sales data I can pull twice a month and the insights dashboard is really useful to see COGS. Plus, the Venue Managers all have access too, so they can make decisions based on that.”

Training staff on growyze is “easy”

“We have a fairly young staff pool and we like to promote from within so a lot of our staff haven’t worked in hospitality before. The ease of training somebody on growyze is really fast and really intuitive. When you’re training a new Manager or Supervisor there’s a million and one things you need to tell them, loads of systems to learn and further development of them as a manager and if you can take an obstacle away from a system that’s traditionally tricky to use then that’s worth its weight in gold. Because of how simple and intuitive growyze is, I can remove several hours from the training time of an already packed training calendar, so even on that basis alone, it’s great.”

When asked if Jack would recommend other unique hospitality venues to use growyze he responds; “I’ll sing growyze’s praises. The fact that it does all of these wonderful things like allowing you to track your stock properly and show your reports nicely and the fact that it’s got a really cool team behind it who are there to solve any troubles you have - it’s totally worth it. I genuinely really, really like the product.” 

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‍If you’d like to try growyze for your venue, with no obligation or credit card required, book a demo with our friendly team today.