Tenanted Pub Stock Control in 2026

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most tenanted pub licensees lose between £3,000 and £5,000 a year to stock shrinkage they never see coming. A 1% variance on wet sales isn’t dramatic enough to trigger an alarm, which is exactly why it happens quietly for months. You’re paying rent, paying the pubco their margin, and bleeding cash to poor stock discipline without realising it.

If you’re running a tenanted pub, you don’t have the luxury of a sloppy stocktake. The pubco will conduct their own count, and if your figures don’t align, you’re liable. More importantly, you can’t improve what you don’t measure — and most pub tenants measure stock like they’re playing bingo: a rough number, a shrug, and hope for the best.

A proper weekly line check and disciplined wet GP tracking can claw back 1-2 gross profit points within two months. That’s the difference between breaking even and actually making money.

This article walks you through exactly how to set up tenanted pub stock control that protects you from the pubco, catches losses before they compound, and gives you real numbers to work with.

Why Spreadsheets Fail in a Tenanted Pub

The fundamental problem with spreadsheets is that they’re not real-time. You’re working from a static opening stock figure, adding purchases, subtracting sales from your till, and trying to land on a number that makes sense. By the time you spot a discrepancy, it’s three weeks old and you have no idea where it came from.

I ran my own pub on a tangle of spreadsheets for about five years. I had stock numbers, keg logs, spirit measures in one file, till reconciliation in another. It was a mess. Every stocktake took an afternoon, and I’d find variance of 3–5% between my records and the actual count. I put that down to measurement error. The pubco put it down to theft or over-pouring. Neither of us was right — I was simply too far behind the numbers to know.

In a tenanted pub, you don’t have the margin for error that a freehold operator might. You’re paying the pubco a wholesale price whether your stock is tight or loose. Every percentage point you lose comes straight out of your GP. And when the pubco’s auditor turns up with a clipboard, a spreadsheet won’t protect you. They want daily logs, till reconciliation, waste sheets, and clarity.

Most stock “theft” is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. Spirits hide losses in over-pouring — a free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml in reality. Draught loses margin to poor cellar temperature, bad line cleaning waste, and line purges that don’t get logged. Every time you change a keg, there’s a litre lost. Every time you clean lines, there’s waste. None of that appears in your till. All of it eats into GP if you don’t account for it separately.

A spreadsheet doesn’t catch any of this because it’s working backwards from till data, not forwards from physical stock. You need a system that reconciles till against physical count the same day, flags variance by line, and gives you somewhere to record the waste that explains the gap.

Wet GP Tracking: The Number That Actually Matters

The most effective way to control stock in a tenanted pub is to track gross profit by line, not by a single headline stock figure. Spirits, draught, cask, and soft are four different businesses. Each one has its own loss patterns, its own waste points, and its own fraud risk. If you only look at total stock variance, you’re flying blind.

At my own pub, I discovered that my draught variance was running at nearly 6% while my spirits were tight at 1.2%. Had I been looking at a single stock number, I’d have assumed I had a measurement problem across the board. In fact, I had a cellar temperature issue and a line cleaning waste problem that I didn’t know I had. Once I dipped the kegs, logged temperatures, and reconciled line waste against till, the number came down to 2.4% within three weeks.

Here’s what you’re tracking:

• Spirits (optics). Weigh every open bottle once a week. A 70cl bottle of vodka weighs 890g full, 800g at 100ml poured. You can measure pour accuracy to the millilitre. Over-pouring of 7ml per drink on 40 drinks a day is 280ml a week, or 14 litres a year — that’s a margin point on most spirit lines.
• Draught (kegs and lines). Dip every keg. Record the date, the dip, and the temperature. Bad cellar temp (above 13°C) causes foaming and waste. Bad line cleaning causes bacterial growth and off-taste — customers complain and you comp pints. You need to know which kegs are moving, which are stalled, and which have lost margin to waste.
• Cask (hand-pull). Same as draught: dip, temperature, date. Cask moves slower so variance shows up over weeks, not days. But it’s where most tenants lose a full point because they don’t monitor ullage or oxidation.
• Till reconciliation. Run your till report the same day you do the physical count. Don’t compare week-to-week or month-to-month. Same day only. You’ll spot a variance of 2–3% immediately rather than wondering about it six weeks later.

Once you have wet GP by line, you can see exactly which product is underperforming and why. And you have the data to argue with the pubco if they question your variance. That’s the protection you need as a tenant.

How to Run a Weekly Line Check

A proper line check takes about 90 minutes if you’re organised. Most tenants don’t do it weekly because they think it’s a full stocktake. It’s not. A line check is a snapshot of physical stock against till, recorded in a way that shows variance immediately.

The most important part of a line check is reconciling it against till data the same day. If your till says you sold 47 pints of Guinness and your dip says the keg dropped by 50 pints, that’s a 3-pint variance. You record that 3-pint variance, log whether it was wastage (line purge, bad pint) or measurement error, and move on. If you don’t reconcile same-day, you lose the thread and end up with a mystery number at the end of the month.

Here’s the routine I use every Friday morning, starting at 10am when the pub is closed:

1. Run the till report. Get the sales figure for each product line, broken down by category. Export it if you can. If your EPOS won’t do this, at least write down the key numbers: pints of draught per line, spirit bottles sold, cask pints.
2. Dip every cask and partial keg in the cellar. Write the dip reading down next to the product name and the date on your dip sheet. Note the cellar temperature. If it’s above 13°C, write down why — broken coolbox, warm spell, whatever.
3. Weigh every open spirit bottle. A set of kitchen scales costs £15. Weigh the bottle as-is, subtract the known empty weight (print a label on every spirit with its empty weight when you first open it), and you have the net liquid. Compare to what the till says you sold. Write the variance down.
4. Record any waste from the previous week. Any pints you comped for bad quality, any line cleaning that happened, any keg changes with leftover beer — log it all on a waste sheet with a date and reason. This is the number that explains variance that isn’t theft or over-pouring.
5. Reconcile physical count against till, by line, same day. Spirits: till says 8 shots, scales say 240ml poured, that’s 30ml per shot — within tolerance. Draught: till says 23 pints sold, dip shows 25 pints dropped — 2 pints unaccounted for. Log it as a 2-pint variance and note whether you have waste that explains it.

This takes about 90 minutes. You now have a physical audit trail that the pubco can’t argue with, and you know exactly where you stand on margins. Do this weekly and you’ll never have a surprise at month-end.

Cellar Discipline and Waste Recording

Most stock loss in a tenanted pub isn’t theft. It’s legitimate waste that you’re not recording. Every time you change a cask, you lose a litre. Every time you clean lines, you lose maybe 2–3 pints. Every time you get a bad pint complaint and comp a replacement, that’s waste. Every time the cellar temperature goes above 13°C and beer foams, that’s waste.

If you don’t log this stuff, your variance looks like shrinkage and the pubco assumes you’ve got a pour control problem or a staff problem. But if you’ve logged it, you can show: “Variance was 2.4%. Of that, 1.8% was waste I’ve documented — line cleaning 0.6%, keg changes 0.8%, comps for quality 0.4%. That leaves 0.6% unaccounted for, which is within normal measurement error.”

The pubco will accept that. They won’t accept a blank variance with no explanation.

Set up a simple waste sheet. Every shift, the person closing the bar records:

• Date and shift
• Any pints comped (with reason: quality, customer, promo)
• Any keg changes (record the partial keg beer poured off)
• Any line cleaning or purges (rough volume)
• Any wastage from broken bottles or spills

At the end of the week, add it all up. You’ll usually find that waste accounts for 0.8–1.5% of wet sales. That explains most of your variance before you even look at theft or over-pouring. And you have an audit trail.

Standing Up to Pubco Audits

The pubco’s stock auditor will turn up unannounced, or with a week’s notice, and they’ll count everything. They’ll compare their count to your records. If there’s a big variance, they’ll accuse you of theft or poor control. If you’ve got numbers, you can argue back. If you haven’t, you’re liable.

In a tenanted pub, the pubco often owns the stock. They’re not just checking that you’ve paid for it — they’re checking that their asset is being looked after. So they care more about variance than a brewer checking a freehold would. A 2% variance might be acceptable. A 5% variance will trigger a conversation about whether you’re fit to run the pub.

The protection you need is simple: daily till reconciliation, weekly physical counts, documented waste, and signed-off records. If you’ve got those, you’re bulletproof. The auditor can’t argue with physical evidence. And if there is a discrepancy, you can point to the exact week it happened and what caused it.

I’ve had two pubco audits in 15 years. Both times, my records were tight enough that they found maybe a 0.8% variance and signed off without comment. Why? Because I could explain every point of it. That’s the difference between running numbers and running a pub blindly.

Tools and Equipment You Actually Need

You don’t need expensive kit to run tight stock control. You need discipline and the right information at the right time. Here’s what actually works:

• A set of kitchen scales. £15–£30. Weigh spirit bottles once a week. This catches 80% of pour control issues in about 10 minutes.
• A dipstick. £10–£20. Dip every cask and keg. A 50-litre cask drops about 1 litre per pint on the dip — you can measure to the nearest half-pint if you’re consistent. Record the dip every week on the same sheet.
• A thermometer. £5. Cellar temperature above 13°C causes foaming and waste. Check it once a week. If it’s consistently high, you’ve got a coolbox problem.
• Till reports exported to a spreadsheet or printed weekly. Most modern EPOS systems will export sales by category. If yours won’t, you’re with a dinosaur system and should upgrade.
• A waste sheet and a pen. Low-tech, but it works. Every shift, write down what didn’t go to a customer. At the end of the week, add it up. You now have waste data that explains variance.

Don’t overthink this. A working pub licensee needs to spend time running the business, not playing with stock software. But those five tools take about 2 hours a week and give you the visibility a pubco audit requires and the margin control you need to make money.

If you want to move beyond a spreadsheet and have everything in one place — StockTap pub stock app is built to do exactly this. It logs dips, weights, till reconciliation, waste, and variance alerts in a format the pubco recognises. But the core discipline — weighing, dipping, recording waste, reconciling same-day — that doesn’t change whether you’re using a spreadsheet or software.

For more information, visit SmartPubTools.