2025 is here 🥳 Looking for a New Year’s resolution that will make a difference and you can actually keep? Have you thought about getting control of your budget?
We can help you with that!
In this article, we look at why effective budgeting is essential more than ever and explore how stock-taking and invoice scanning should be one of your top priorities.
Plus, we’ll show you how Nory’s new features can help you make this process a success.
Unleash the power of effective budgeting
The beginning of the year is the perfect time to assess past performance and set a strong financial foundation for the future.
After the hustle and bustle of the holidays, January typically slows down. So why not use this time to review your budgets and identify cost-cutting strategies?
2025 could be a challenging year. The new UK budget will increase costs for restaurants of all shapes and sizes, meaning the need to keep your margins healthy and reduce operational costs will be key.
Not to mention, staffing shortages and rising costs are ongoing challenges.
Here at Nory we want to help you safeguard your restaurant, giving you the tools to refine your operations, cut costs, and protect your profits.
New features alert 🚨 Take your budgeting to the next level
We’ve developed new features (and have more coming soon) that’ll help you improve your budgeting by:
- Enhancing your stock taking (available now)
- Streamlining your invoice management (coming very soon)
Let’s take a look at them in more detail:
Create a seamless flow for invoice management
We know that scanning invoices isn’t always a walk in the park. OCR (optical character recognition) isn’t always accurate, and poor image quality makes it difficult to process invoices seamlessly.
We took it personally and we decided to improve it.
Our goal was simple: make invoice scanning (or OCR) faster, easier, and a delight to use.
How? By capturing clearer invoice images to improve OCR accuracy. 👏
Here are the new features that’ll help us deliver on this promise:
- Document scanner plugin — we’ve added a new document scanner plugin to the Nory IM app. This plugin automatically detects the document in the camera view and adjusts the image to ensure the invoice fits perfectly within the frame. Helping you capture clearer and more accurate images of invoices.
- Image quality checker — after uploading an invoice, the system runs a quick validation to check for blurriness and overexposure, helping you process the invoice much quickly and seamlessly.
Side note: As with all of our features, we’re constantly monitoring performance and making adjustments as necessary. No need to thank us — we are happy to serve!
How does the new invoice scanning help with budgeting?
- You can now keep a close eye on supplier costs in real-time, identify price hikes, and optimise spending to improve your margins.
- Improve your financial reporting. Through storing invoices digitally, making it easier to review spending, plan budgets, and make informed decisions about your bottom line.
- Enhance your cash flow management. Organising incoming and outgoing payments in a central location, ultimately being in control of your cash flow.
🚨 Coming soon: Transform the stock counting experience with Nory’s templates 📝
Stock counting is time-intensive, with operators manually counting every item. One. By. One. 🥱
And we get it — running a restaurant is busy work. Do you really have time to spare to regularly count your stock?
But we know how essential it is to restaurant success. Without routine inventory checks, maintaining optimal stock levels could become a big challenge.
Don’t panic! We’re excited to introduce new stock count templates to overcome this hurdle. 🥳
We’ve redesigned the Stock Count UI to be all about speed and efficiency.
✅ Inline editing—update counts directly, no need to click into each item.
✅ Simplified units of measure—see exactly what you need at a glance.
Setting up a template:
Using a template & new stock count UI:
With this upcoming feature, we aim to bring some magic to the stock counting interface. ✨
How do accurate stock counts improve your bottom line?
With this upcoming release we want to help you optimise inventory orders, minimise waste, and boost profit margins.
- Prevent over-ordering. Overordering is a common problem for restaurants, and it bleeds profits. Accurate stock taking ensures you’re not ordering blindly and wasting money on items you don’t need.
Hot tip 🔥 Use Nory’s AI-powered demand-based ordering to predict what ingredients you’ll need to meet customer demand and watch your profits soar ✨
- Minimise food waste. 10% of food bought by restaurants never reaches customers and 6% of total sales are lost due to this waste. That’s a massive hit to your profits. Stock checking provides clear visibility of your current stock levels, helping you figure out exactly what you have and what you need for the future. As a result, less food goes to waste, and you reign in your spending. It’s a win-win.
- Keep customers happy. When your kitchen is fully stocked with all ingredients, customers are never left disappointed. and they’re more likely to dine with you again or recommend you to friends and family. Result.
Food for thought 👀 Consumers are making more environmentally conscious decisions when it comes to food. By reducing waste, you show them that you care about being a more sustainable operator. It’s good for your brand reputation, and it helps the planet. Two birds, one stone.
Nory success story 🥳 See how CUPP has reduced its total food waste by 60% (from 3-5% to 0.5-2%) across the business since working with Nory.
CUPP monitors food waste at both a CPU and site level, easily spotting how to make improvements — from reducing the amount of ingredients sent to the CPU or liaising with individual franchises to determine why their waste levels are higher than expected.
Nory CPU has streamlined how our franchisees and stores order to us and how we get information back to them. If things are out of stock or if we need to update something, it’s quick and easy to do it”.
Paul Tanner, Managing Director at CUPP
Prepare your restaurant for the year ahead with Nory
As we look towards the future, our mission is to make your restaurant a success, especially in the face of budgetary constraints and industry challenges.
For us, the key to thriving this year lies in proactive cost management and operational refinement. This is where Nory could become your invaluable partner helping you monitor sales, track stock levels, and identify ways to cut costs and boost margins.
FAQs
How will the UK budget affect restaurants?
Here are some of the key changes in the upcoming budget that will impact hospitality:
- Business rates relief will drop to 40% for 2025-26 from the 1st of April 2025, up to an £110,000 cap. With this decrease, research estimates that the average restaurant’s rates bill will rise from £5,051 to £12,122.
- Employer National Insurance (NI) contributions will rise to 15% in April 2025, an increase of 1.2%. This increase will likely impact payroll expenses. The results? An expected 2-4% reduction in net profit margins.
- The Employer’s NI Secondary Threshold is also dropping, decreasing from £9,100 to £5,000. This means employers will pay NI on employee earnings above £417 per month instead of £758. Operators with part-time staff may find costs increasing as a result.
- The National Living Wage will rise by 6.7% to £12.21 for those aged 21 and over, raising operator payroll costs.
Although these changes will impact some restaurants more than others (larger restaurants may be able to absorb some of these costs), all operators will be affected.
What is stock management?
Stock management involves tracking the amount of stock you have (including food, drink, equipment, and so on). Tracking this information tells you the quantity of stock you have, the value of it, and lets you compare it against your previous inventories.
What is stock management software?
Stock management software (also known as inventory management software) tracks and optimises your restaurant inventory. Instead of manually tracking and counting stock, the system does it for you. It monitors:
- What you order
- What you use
- How much inventory you have left
It then uses this data to ensure you have the right ingredients to meet customer demand. With Nory, for example, you can predict hourly sales with 90-95% accuracy. Using these insights, our system makes inventory recommendations to help you optimise your stock levels and increase margins.
Does stock management software track pricing?
Yes, depending on the system you use. With Nory, for example, our software tracks costs and vendor prices in real-time. If inventory prices go up, you can see it instantly. Then, you can step in to renegotiate or source a new supplier to maximise profitability across your supply chain.
Nory success story 🥳 See how Rocksalt uses Nory’s integrated supplier management features to track inventory prices and supplier costs in real-time, allowing them to make instant changes to optimise spending.
“Because all the ordering and invoices are updated daily, we can catch a price increase from a supplier pretty much instantly. As soon as we spot it, we can react to it immediately.” – Stephen Burns, Group Operations Manager at Rocksalt.
Can stock taking improve COGs?
Yes! Cost of goods sold (COGS) is closely tied to stock counting because you’re focused on what items you’re buying and how much they cost. When your stock taking is as optimal and accurate as possible, you prevent waste, spoilage, and overstocking — which can have a huge impact on your profits.
Take a look at Bubble CiTea as an example. Using Nory to optimise inventory, the bubble tea operation:
- Reduced overall waste by 44% (from 3.2% o 1.8%)
- Reduced tea waste by 50% from £7k to £3.5k per week
- Saved £25k per annum on milk
