What is the best way to take expired food items out of inventory?

[erinandrews]

Hello,

We are a coffee shop that outsources for food and pastry items. Currently I am entering all incoming pastries, sandwiches, etc to inventory stock daily. What is the best way to take items out of inventory for spoilage? Do I take them out manually and choose "loss" as the option for removing them from stock? Or should I ring them up as a "comp" sale and add an "expired" option in the comp reasons?

Thank you for your help!

[Chad]

Hey @erinandrews! I'm sorry that no one has followed up with you. 

This is an interesting question, because it really comes down how you want to track the spoiled items. It's a question that really doesn't have a wrong answer. 🙂

I see both options as smart, I would use the loss option to avoid confusion if you comp a lot of items. If you don't the comp option would be a good idea, because then you can track how many pastries have gone to waste. 

Might be useful date if you want to adjust how many pastries you order in the future? 

[mistyjones8]

If you take expired food out of your square as loss, does it show in your reports somewhere?

[Helen]

@mistyjones8 There isn't a report that will show you when you've adjusted your stock levels and selected the reason 'Loss'.

I'm wondering if, as a workaround, could you create a comp reason for 'Expired' and then comp the sale for those items? (You can process a $0.00 'sale' for comped items.) You can then view the Comps report from your online Square Dashbaord. I'll keep an eye out for any other workarounds! 

[y2c]

Waste is a very common thing that happens often in the food industry. Amazes me that square does not have a solution for this but rather offers a work around. While this work around should work for the use case it is not the most coinvent, due to the fact that each item has to be comped individually from the current sale screen which is annoying and time consuming. Only way to comp an entire ticket at once is to process the sale and then reopen and comp (which is not a screen all employees have access to). 

I also recently read that comping items is not available using the square terminal. Hopefully this is old info as this will be an issue for me if this is the case. I use square terminal at a concession stand and will need to comp wasted food items at the end of the night, so that inventory shows correctly.