Bar pre-inventory checklist for 2026

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most pubs run their pre-inventory checks the night before the formal stock count, by which time a week’s worth of pouring errors and wastage are already locked into your numbers. A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year, and by the time you discover it in your quarterly variance report, the damage is months old and the cause is invisible. The real work of inventory control happens in the seven days before you count, not on the morning you pull out the scales. If you’ve been running stock on spreadsheets or gut feel, you’re flying blind—and your gross profit margin is paying the price. This article gives you the exact checklist I use every week at my own pub to catch stock loss, line waste, and measurement errors before they become financial leaks. You’ll learn what to check, when to check it, and why most pubs miss the loss points that matter.

Why a pre-inventory check actually matters

Here’s what most pub operators don’t realise: your EPOS system tells you what you sold. Your bank statement tells you what you took. But neither of them tells you whether you made money. The gap between those two numbers is where loss lives. The number that actually matters is wet GP by line, not a single headline stock figure. And you can’t calculate that without a disciplined pre-inventory process.

When I first took over my Marston’s pub, I was running stock on a tangle of spreadsheets and still losing track of partial kegs and spirit measures. I built a simple count routine around a dipstick and a set of scales, and the weekly variance went from guesswork to a number I could trust within a fortnight. Within two months, I’d clawed back 1–2 GP points just by identifying where the slippage was happening. Most of that loss wasn’t malice—it was sloppy measuring, cellar temperature creep, and line cleaning that nobody had actually logged.

Spirits hide losses in over-pouring (a free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml), draught hides it in poor cellar temperature and bad line cleaning waste, and most stock ‘theft’ is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. A pre-inventory checklist forces you to look at those three loss points every single week, not once a month when it’s too late to trace.

Daily bar checks: the foundation

You can’t do a meaningful pre-inventory check without daily discipline. This doesn’t mean a two-hour audit every morning—it means a five-minute walk through the bar during quiet time, every shift.

What to check every single day

• Spirit bottles open and in use. Are there four spirit bottles open when there should be two? Partial bottles left on the back shelf from last week? Open bottle = exposure to pouring variance and evaporation.
• Draught taps running cold. A single degree of temperature drift in your cellar compounds over a week. A warm cask will pour slower, waste more, and fail faster than logs suggest.
• Line couplings for leaks. A slow leak at a coupling wastes 2–3 pints per day and looks like normal pouring loss. Check the cellar floor and couplings after every shift.
• Till readings match what you poured. If your till says you sold 40 pints of bitter but the line ran cleaner than usual, something doesn’t add up—flag it same day, not at inventory.
• Spillage and waste logged. Most pubs have a waste book. Use it. Every broken glass, every dropped pint, every cleaning waste—write it down. It’s a loss tracker, not busy work.

That last one is critical. I learned this the hard way: on a Friday night my head barman dropped a crate of lager while restocking. Nobody logged it. At stock count three weeks later, my variance was off by £80 and I had no idea why. A waste book closes that gap.

Weekly spirit and draught audit

This is where the real control happens. Once a week—I do mine on a Tuesday morning before opening—you need to physically check your open spirits and running draught lines against your till data. This takes 20 minutes maximum.

Spirit audit: the process

Get a set of kitchen scales (£15 from any supermarket) and weigh every open spirit bottle. A standard 70cl bottle of spirits weighs roughly 750g full. A half-full bottle should weigh around 440g. If a bottle that should contain 50 measures of 25ml spirit only weighs what 35 measures should weigh, you’ve got an over-pouring problem—and you’ve found it before formal stock, not after.

Weigh open spirit bottles weekly because a free-poured 25ml measure is often actually 32–35ml, and that compounding error is invisible until stock count catches it. When you find a 15ml overage in a single bottle, that’s roughly three pints’ worth of margin lost to poor pouring discipline.

• Spirits open more than two weeks should be flagged. Old stock oxidises and tastes different—customers notice and you lose consistency.
• If a spirit bottle is running faster than till data suggests, it’s over-pouring or leakage. Recalibrate your measures or check for seepage.
• Weigh bottles at the same time every week so variables (temperature, air pressure) stay consistent.

Draught line audit: the process

For every cask and keg in the cellar, use a simple dipstick or dip tube to measure the remaining volume. A standard 11-gallon firkin should be roughly level with a standard depth marker; a half-cask should sit at a known line. Compare what the dipstick tells you against what your till says you’ve poured.

If your till shows 25 pints sold but the cask depth suggests only 18 pints have come out, the cellar temperature is probably too high (beer runs slower, waste is higher) or the line is leaking.

• Cellar temperature should sit at 55–57°F (13–14°C). Every degree above that increases pouring loss by 0.5–1%.
• Check line couplings and the tap font for slow leaks. A leak the size of a grain of rice adds up to three pints lost per day.
• Log every partial keg or cask by volume remaining, not by visual guess. “Half full” is not a measurement.

The cellar deep-dive

Once a month (I do mine on the last Tuesday), do a full cellar walkthrough. This is a 45-minute job that catches the loss points that daily checks miss.

What to inspect

• Cask and keg rotation. Anything older than 21 days should be moved to the front. Stale stock hides lost margin because customers reject it or it goes to waste.
• Line cleaning schedule. Are your lines being cleaned every two weeks? A dirty line costs you 15–20% pouring loss and tastes terrible. Write it down.
• Cellaring temperature and humidity. Humidity above 70% corrodes couplings and causes slow leaks. Temperature creep is slow poison—it accelerates beer degradation and line waste.
• Tap font condition. A cracked font or loose coupling is a hidden leak. Water pooling around taps means loss is happening right now.
• Excess stock on shelf. If you’re holding five kegs of the same bitter when you only sell 1.5 per week, cash is tied up and stock is ageing. Match holding to actual sales velocity.

At my pub, I discovered a slow leak under the tap font during a routine cellar walk that had been costing about £15 a week. The visual inspection took two minutes; the financial impact was £780 a year. That’s why you walk the cellar, not just look at spreadsheets.

Till reconciliation and loss identification

This is the step most pubs skip, and it’s exactly why their variance is a mystery at stock count. Reconcile against till data the same day you count—waiting a week makes it impossible to trace what went wrong.

After your weekly spirit and draught audit, pull your till report for that specific day. Compare:

• Spirit sales (by line item) against bottle weight loss
• Draught sales (by line item) against cask depth loss
• Recorded wastage against actual waste logged in your waste book

If your till says you sold 30 pints of lager but your cask depth loss suggests only 22 pints came out, you have a 8-pint gap. That gap is leakage, over-pouring, pouring errors, or theft. Same day, you can trace which one. Three weeks later at stock count, you can’t.

I use SmartPubTools to log this variance every week. The pattern tells me whether the problem is systemic (cellar temperature, line maintenance) or individual (a specific barstaff member’s pouring consistency). You can use a spreadsheet, but the discipline of entering it into a system you review weekly is what changes behaviour.

The night before formal inventory

The night before your monthly or quarterly formal stock count, your pre-inventory checks should have already identified and corrected most loss points. This final checklist is about housekeeping and validation, not discovery.

Final checks

• Stock is physically organised. All bottles facing forward, all casks in a line, no stock hidden behind other stock. A messy cellar leads to double-counts and missed items.
• Till is cleared and reconciled. No hanging transactions, no unposted refunds. Your till and your physical count need to speak the same language.
• Waste book is complete. Every recorded loss from the past week is written down and totalled. Your formal count will adjust for this—don’t count waste twice.
• Open bottles are positioned consistently. All spirits facing the same direction, all open draught couplings at the same height. Consistency reduces recount errors.
• Temperature is stable. Your cellar should be at 55–57°F and stable for at least 24 hours before count. Temperature swings during count throw off cask measurements.

On the morning of the count itself, count early—don’t wait until mid-afternoon when staff are moving stock around. A 9 a.m. count is far cleaner than a 3 p.m. count.