Ok, so I go to a large church here in Arkansas that has two campuses and there is a small walk up coffee bar at each campus. These are fully functional bars mind you. They serve iced coffee drinks as well as espresso based drinks. No pastries or food, just drinks. One of the shops has been pretty much a mismanaged loss that is just there as a perk for church attendees.

Well, I've been asked recently if I'd be interested in managing the shops in order to get a handle on inventories and hopefully bring the shops to profitability. I've been asked to do this because people know that I've been working this whole year on opening my own shop in town in the near future. The folks at the church thought it'd be great experience for me to try my hand at managing their shops before jumping into my own thing. The only problem is, I'm very intimidated for some reason. I'm not sure what inventory measures are being implemented at this point if any and I really have no experience walking into an already running shop and trying to manage it. For some reason i think I'd feel less intimidated by starting my own from scratch and knowing every detail about it. Of course common sense tells me that this would be a great opportunity to take a practice run at running a shop on someone else's dime before doing it with my own.

Does anyone have any advice on what my approach should be. What is a simple and inexpensive method to getting a handle on what is moving through the store and on inventory? I'm not sure they're going to want to plop down several thousand dollars for POS software. They've got something that they're using currently but I'm not sure what it is.

Any advice on managing would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks