Inventory management built for hotels, not retail stores
Stores, vendor purchase orders, department requisitions, and recipe-linked menu deductions — how Platinum properties stop losing money to untracked stock.
Hotel inventory is nothing like retail inventory. A retail store manages one category of product flowing in one direction — from supplier to customer. A hotel manages housekeeping supplies for rooms, raw ingredients for the kitchen, beverages for the bar, cleaning materials for maintenance, and consumables for reception — often across multiple stores, departments, and outlets simultaneously, with different approval levels governing each flow.
The failure mode most hotels fall into is managing this complexity in Excel spreadsheets or informal chat conversations between department heads and the purchasing officer. Purchase orders are raised verbally or by message. Deliveries are not counted against what was ordered. Department heads request stock informally and receive whatever is available. Nobody knows the real stock position until someone physically counts everything — by which point the kitchen has already run short of something critical or the bar has been over-ordering for three months.
StayView's inventory module is built around how hotel operations actually work. You define your stores — a main store, a kitchen store, a bar store, a housekeeping store — and manage stock levels and transfers between them from a single interface. Vendors are added to the system with contact details and payment terms. Purchase orders follow a defined workflow: raised by the purchasing team, approved by management, sent to the vendor, and then confirmed against a goods received note when the delivery arrives and is counted.
Department requisitions follow the same workflow logic. A department head submits a requisition through the system — the kitchen needs 10 kg of rice from the main store, or housekeeping needs 20 bottles of disinfectant. An authorised manager reviews and approves or adjusts the request before any stock is released. The transfer is logged against both stores immediately, and every movement has a timestamp and a user attached to it.
For hotels using StayView's Restaurant POS, menu items can be linked to their component ingredients with precise quantities per portion. When a plate of food is sold at the restaurant, the system automatically deducts the corresponding ingredient quantities from the kitchen store. Finance can see the cost of sales set against revenue in real time, and the general manager can review gross margin by menu item without waiting for a month-end physical count to reveal what actually left the kitchen.