Restaurant Inventory Management with Business Central and LS Central
Recipe-level inventory, daily stock-takes, ingredient-level margins — without the spreadsheets the chef has been keeping since 2018.
Why Restaurant Inventory Is Harder Than Retail
A retailer sells SKUs as bought. A restaurant transforms raw items into finished dishes — and one raw item ends up in twenty different dishes. The inventory system has to track ingredients, recipes, yields, waste, and the sales transactions that link them. Generic ERP without recipe management forces the chef back to Excel.
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RAW
Ingredients in kg / L / unitsFlour, oil, lamb, tomatoes — bought from suppliers, received into central kitchen or outlet stores. |
PREP
Half-products / mise en placeSauces, marinades, dough — outputs of the kitchen, inputs to the dish. Has a shelf life of hours, not weeks. |
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DISH
Menu items sold at the tablePasta, kebab, sandwich — the line on the receipt. Each dish has a recipe that consumes ingredients and prep. |
WASTE
The hidden 8–15%Spoilage, prep loss, plate returns. Visible only when raw vs sold reconciliation is automated. |
The chef's spreadsheet is the symptom, not the system
Every restaurant group we work with has a chef keeping a personal spreadsheet of "actual" recipe costs. That spreadsheet exists because the inventory system doesn't track recipes, doesn't post raw consumption against dish sales, and doesn't reconcile theoretical to actual.
Business Central with LS Central closes that loop natively. The chef gets a real cost every morning; the GM gets variance flags every day.
What LS Central Brings to Restaurants
LS Central is built for hospitality from the start — it ships with menu management, table service, KOT routing, and recipe-level inventory. Sitting on Business Central, it gives you finance, purchasing, and consolidated reporting in the same tenant. Per LS Retail's product documentation, the recipe and BOM engine handles single-item, half-product, and multi-level recipe structures used by F&B groups.
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8–15%
food cost reduction in first 6 months
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Daily
food cost visibility vs monthly
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110K+
LS Central locations in 157 countries
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Five Daily Workflows LS Central Replaces
From 100+ implementations across UAE and KSA F&B groups, these are the five workflows that change on day one:
- Daily stock-take. A tablet-based count by item or area, reconciled against theoretical consumption.
- Recipe-cost refresh. Supplier price changes auto-flow to every recipe; menu margin is recalculated daily.
- Multi-outlet transfer. Move a half-product (e.g. dough) from central kitchen to outlet, with full traceability.
- Variance flag. Outlet GM gets a push when theoretical vs actual exceeds 2% — before it compounds.
- Menu engineering. Star/dog/puzzle/plowhorse classification by margin and popularity, rebuilt every week.
Spreadsheet Chef vs LS Central Chef
Why Implement with Novasoft?
Novasoft is a Diamond LS Retail Partner 2026 with deep F&B implementation experience — fine dining, QSR, cloud kitchens, hotel restaurants across UAE and KSA. We have shipped Deliverect and Urban Piper aggregator connectors so online orders post back to LS Central recipes the same way a dine-in order does.
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Recipe-Native
Multi-level recipes, half-products, prep waste.
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Multi-Outlet
Central kitchen, satellite outlets, transfers.
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Connected
Deliverect + Urban Piper aggregators built in.
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See Your Real Food Cost Tomorrow Morning
Bring last month's P&L and your top-selling menu items. We will show you what your real food cost looks like with recipe-level LS Central.
Book Free Assessment Explore LS CentralSources
- LS Retail — LS Central for restaurants. lsretail.com/products/ls-central
- Microsoft Learn — Business Central. learn.microsoft.com/dynamics365/business-central
Last updated May 2026