How to do a stock take in a pub

A stock take tells you what your till can't: whether what left the cellar, the back bar and the walk-in matches what you actually sold. Without one, a falling GP could be theft, waste, a pricing mistake or a brewery price rise, and you've no way of telling which.

Here's how to do one properly, for wet stock and for food, with a worked example.

The core sum

Every stock take comes down to one calculation:

Usage = opening stock + deliveries − closing stock

Then:

Variance = usage − what the till says you sold

If you used 352 pints of lager but the till only recorded 340, you have a 12-pint shortfall to explain. The same logic works for spirits in measures, wine in bottles and food in pounds.

Before you start

• Pick a fixed time, usually before opening or after close, so no stock is moving.
• Record all deliveries and credits since the last count, from delivery notes and invoices.
• Print a stock sheet in the order your cellar and bar are laid out, so you count in a walking route rather than jumping around.
• Get the till reading for the same period, product by product.
• Note anything given away or written off: staff drinks, comps, pulled-through beer after a line clean, a dropped case. If you don't record it, it shows up as a loss.

How to count wet stock

Draught (kegs and casks)

• Full kegs and casks: count them.
• Kegs on connection: weigh them and subtract the empty weight of the same keg type, then convert to pints. Beer weighs a little over 1kg per litre and a pint is 568ml, so as a rough guide every 1kg of beer left is a little under two pints.
• Casks: estimate by dipping or weighing, and note how long the cask has been on. Ale has a short life once tapped, so record anything you have to pour away.

Spirits

• Full bottles: count them.
• Open bottles: estimate in tenths of a bottle, or weigh them if you have scales and the empty bottle weights. Be consistent: if you count in tenths one week and weigh the next, the variance won't mean much.
• Measures: remember whether your pub sells in 25ml or 35ml. You can use one or the other, not both. A 70cl bottle gives 28 × 25ml or 20 × 35ml.

Bottles, cans, wine and minerals

• Count every unit on shelves, in fridges and in the cellar.
• Open wine: estimate in glasses or tenths. Still wine by the glass is sold in 125ml, 175ml and multiples, so a 75cl bottle gives six 125ml or a little over four 175ml glasses.
• Post-mix and syrups: weigh or estimate the boxes in use.

How to count food stock

Food is counted in the units you buy it in, valued at your purchase price excluding VAT:

• Walk-in and fridges: meat, fish, dairy, prepped items. Count part-used packs as a fraction.
• Freezers: count by pack or by weight.
• Dry store: flour, oils, tins, sauces.
• Prepped food: value at the cost of its ingredients, or leave it out and be consistent.

Then work out your actual food cost:

Food cost % = (opening food stock + purchases − closing food stock) ÷ net food sales × 100

Net food sales means excluding VAT: food sold for consumption on the premises is standard-rated, so if you're VAT-registered divide the till figure by 1.2. Your food GP is 100% minus your food cost %.

Worked example: four weeks of lager

A pub sells one draught lager. Here's the four-week stock take:

At a net selling price of £4.33 a pint (£5.20 on the till, less VAT), that's £73.61 of lost sales. At a cost of £1.70 a pint, it's £28.90 of stock.

Seventeen pints over four weeks of a busy line may well be ordinary over-pouring and unrecorded spillage. If last month's figure was 5 and this month's is 17, that's the trend to look at.

A wet stock-take sheet you can copy

Use one line per product, in the order you walk the cellar and bar. Fill in the till sales from your product report for exactly the same period.

Usage is opening plus deliveries minus closing. Variance is usage minus till sales minus recorded wastage. A positive number means stock has gone that you can't account for; a negative one (you sold more than you used) usually means a till or counting error, which is worth chasing just as hard.

When the variance is bad: what to check

Work through the boring explanations before the dramatic ones.

1. Counting errors. Recount the biggest variances. A missed keg is 88 pints.
2. Delivery errors. Did you get what the invoice says? Were returns and credits recorded?
3. Till errors. Is a product rung up under the wrong button? A guest ale sold as the house bitter will make one line look short and another look long.
4. Unrecorded wastage. Line cleans, pulled-through beer, out-of-date stock, breakages, comps and staff drinks.
5. Pouring. Over-pouring spirits, oversized wine measures, pints topped up generously.
6. Price errors. Is the till price what you think it is?
7. Theft. Only once everything above is ruled out, and handled carefully.

Look at where the variance sits: one product, one category, one area. And look at when: if your stock-take periods line up with rota changes, compare the rota with the variance pattern.

How often to stock take

These are common practice, not legal requirements. The right rhythm is the one you can keep.

Common stock-take mistakes

1. Counting during trade. Stock moves while you count and the numbers never balance.
2. Not recording wastage. Every line clean and every binned cask makes the variance look worse than it is.
3. Inconsistent methods. Tenths one month, weights the next.
4. Forgetting credits. A returned keg that was never credited shows up as a loss.
5. Comparing against the wrong period. The till report and the stock count must cover exactly the same dates and times.
6. Doing nothing with the result. A stock take is only useful if you act on what it shows.

Where ShiftComplete helps

ShiftComplete doesn't count stock or connect to your till. It does help with the routines that keep stock losses down:

• Checklists by weekday: line cleaning on its day, cellar checks every morning, a weekly spirits spot check, each tick named and timestamped.
• Day notes on the rota so everyone knows Monday morning is stock-take and the cellar is out of bounds.
• The rota itself, so when you investigate a variance you can see who was on.
• Incident and maintenance logs for the leaking coupler or the broken cooler that's been wasting beer.

£1.49 per staff member per month, free for 60 days with no card. For the pricing side of the numbers, read how to calculate GP on drinks, and for the cellar routine, our cellar management checklist.