Optimum Control Guide
Optimum Control — Getting Started
What the system does, how the pieces fit together, and the habits that keep the numbers honest.
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Optimum Control is the inventory and food-cost system used in our F&B venues. It tracks what you buy, what you count on the shelf, and what you sell — then shows the gap between what should have been used and what actually was. This article covers the basics; individual tasks each have their own article.
🧭 Brand new? Read in this order
2 Finding Your Way Around Optimum Control. 3 The counting series — three short articles. 4 Entering an Invoice. Everything else can wait until your role actually needs it.
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If floor training contradicts these articles, check first Training here gets passed person to person, and shortcuts creep in along the way. If something you were shown on the floor contradicts these articles, check with your manager before adopting it. These articles describe how it's meant to be done.
🔑 Getting access
- Only two venues are licensed:Maestro's and Lakeside Dining, each with its own instance and database. Other F&B venues (Yacht Club, Whiskey Bar, Boardwalk, Boathouse/Clubhouse) fold into one of those two.
- Licensed per workstation, not per person. It only runs on specific computers set up for it — you can't install it on your own laptop, and licenses are limited.
- Everyone at a workstation shares the same OC login — no individual sign-in, and all users are admin-level inside the program (nothing to do with Windows or Argus IT admin).
- It only works on the Resort corporate network — wired Ethernet or internal corporate Wi-Fi. It will not work over guest Wi-Fi, a personal hotspot, public Wi-Fi, or from off-property.
Don't know the login for your workstation? Ask another F&B staff member who uses it, or your F&B manager / executive chef — not IT or TracRite. It's a shared workstation login your team controls. Need a license for a new or replacement workstation, or a second venue? That's one of the few things Argus IT handles — see Optimum Control — Common Issues and How to Get Help (KB-210001) for the request form.
🔄 The cycle — what you actually do
Optimum Control runs on a repeating cycle. Once you understand these five steps, the whole system makes sense: 1 Count inventory. Physically count what's on your shelves and enter it. An opening count when you start, then closing counts on a regular schedule — weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. 2 Enter invoices. Every delivery gets entered. This updates your pricing, your stock levels, and the cost of every recipe using those items. 3 Bring in sales. Sales flow in automatically from the Squirrel POS. Your part is checking they arrived, not entering them. 4 Record waste. Optional, but worth doing — spills, spoilage, comps, mistakes. Without it, waste just looks like unexplained shrinkage. 5 Run your reports. This is where the value is: variance — the difference between what you should have used and what you actually used.
💡 Why the count matters so much
Almost every inventory problem traces back to one thing: an inaccurate count. The system can only compare your count against what it expects. If the count is wrong, the variance report is wrong, and you'll spend time chasing a problem that doesn't exist. Slow, careful counting saves far more time than it costs.
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Don't let too much time pass between counts For key items especially, counting no more than two weeks apart keeps your numbers meaningful. The longer the gap, the harder it is to work out where a variance came from.
🚫 Habits that quietly wreck the numbers
These shortcuts get handed down from person to person. Whatever you may have been shown, don't pick them up: - Copying last count's numbers because "it's about the same." One invented count poisons two periods.
- Rounding counts to whole numbers. 1.75 bottles is 1.75, not 2. Rounding is a variance you created yourself.
- Forcing an invoice to balance by nudging a price until it works. A wrong unit cost silently mis-prices every recipe using that item.
- Receiving an order without checking the delivery. Clicking through and saving puts stock in the system that may never have arrived.
- Letting invoices or waste pile up "to enter later." Stale entry means stale prices, wrong periods, and reports that lie.
- Exploring Settings because the program lets you. Everyone shares an admin-level login, so nothing is locked — including tools that can delete data. Stay inside the tasks your job needs.
💡 Each of these is covered properly in its own article.
🗂️ The language — a few terms
Item Something you buy (a case of tomatoes, a bottle of gin). Prep / batch recipe Something you make in-house from other items (a sauce, a stock, a batch mix). Product Something you sell off the menu, built from items and preps. Storage location Where something physically lives (walk-in, dry storage, bar). Counting is organized around these. Count sheet The working list you count from. Finalizing Locking in a count so reports can be run from it. Variance The gap between what the system expected you to use and what you actually used.
🆘 If something goes wrong
Program problem — errors, crashes, failed saves, a report that won't run → TracRite support at Support@tracrite.net (they know their software best).
"How do I / why does my data look like this?" — missing items, vendors, recipes, or numbers that look off → your F&B manager or executive chef. These are operational questions, not software faults.
Hardware, network, a lost license, or OC missing from a workstation → that's the short list Argus IT handles.
See Optimum Control — Common Issues and How to Get Help (KB-210001) for the full "who to contact for what" breakdown before reaching out.
ArgusIT KB# 210002 · Tags: optimum control · oc pro · inventory · food cost · getting started · tracrite
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