Daily Checklist for Pub Managers: Control Everything

Last updated: 6 April 2026

Most pub managers spend their day reacting to crises instead of preventing them. That’s not because they’re bad at their job — it’s because they don’t have a system. Without a daily checklist, critical tasks get missed, money slips out the back door, and staff don’t know what standards you actually expect. I’ve seen managers handle the same problems every single day because nothing is written down.

A proper pub manager daily checklist isn’t about being rigid or corporate. It’s about making invisible problems visible so you can actually control them. This article walks you through the checklist I use at The Teal Farm, the specific numbers you need to check, and the tools that make tracking them automatic instead of manual.

Opening Shift Checklist: Set the Standard Before Service Starts

The most effective way to control your pub is to establish control before the first customer walks through the door. Opening procedures take 20 minutes at The Teal Farm because we follow the same sequence every single day. It’s not about being obsessive — it’s about making sure nothing surprises you during service.

Cash Handling

Check your till float against your reconciliation from yesterday. If you ended with £200 in the float, you should start with £200. If it doesn’t match, find out why before you open. Write it down. Don’t guess.

Count the float in front of a witness (your opening team member). Tills go out of balance when nobody is watching them. Use your POS system to record the opening float amount — this creates an audit trail. Without it, you have no defence if money goes missing.

Check that your till rolls have printed and are in the correct drawers. A till that runs out of paper mid-shift creates confusion and lost transactions.

Stock and Temperature Control

Walk the cold store. Check fridge temperatures on your thermometer — they should read 2-4°C. Check freezer temperatures — 0°C or below. If temperatures are wrong, note the time and reason. Food safety violations aren’t the only cost; spoilt stock costs real money. Most pubs lose between £200-400 monthly to temperature failures nobody checked.

Do a visual stock count on your bestsellers. You don’t need to count everything — count your top 3-5 SKUs (stock keeping units): your house lager, your top wine, your most popular spirit. Compare what you see to what your system says you have. Large discrepancies mean either you have a stock issue or your pour cost tracking is wrong. Both need fixing before service.

A proper stock take process takes 10 minutes daily if you’re just checking key lines. A full count takes 45 minutes and should happen once weekly, not daily.

Staff Briefing and Service Standards

Spend 5 minutes with your opening team. Tell them what you expect: hand-pulls cleaned, taps flowing, toilets checked, floors ready. Don’t assume they know. Most service failures happen because managers didn’t state the standard — they just expected it.

Check that hand-pulls are clean and working, taps are flowing correctly, and the bar layout is ready for service. Flat lager poured at 11:02 AM on a Monday loses customers. Find it at 10:55 AM and you fix it before anyone knows.

Mid-Shift Monitoring: Watch for Problems Before They Become Expensive

Your shift doesn’t end at closing — it runs continuously from open to close. Mid-shift checks take 10-15 minutes and catch problems while you can still fix them.

Cash Position During Service

Every 2-3 hours during service, do a quick till reconciliation. This means: take a Z-read from your POS (a shift summary that shows cash in vs. cash out), count the till, and reconcile the difference. If you’re £50 out, you catch it while staff are still on shift and can pinpoint the issue. At closing, a £50 discrepancy is a mystery.

Cash flow visibility during service is the difference between solving a problem and living with it. I catch 80% of till issues before close-of-shift reconciliation simply by checking mid-service.

Labour Visibility

Check your POS labour report mid-shift. How many staff are clocked in right now? What’s your labour cost percentage so far today? If you’re running at 35% labour cost and it’s only lunchtime, you need to send someone home early or adjust your afternoon schedule. If you wait until close, the damage is done.

Real-time labour monitoring means you don’t discover over-staffing at the end of the night — you control it as it happens.

Service Quality

Walk the bar and the floor. Are customers waiting more than 2 minutes for a drink? Are tables clean? Are toilets being checked? Write down what you see. Don’t correct staff in front of customers — note it and address it in a quiet moment. Standards slip slowly. Catching them mid-shift keeps them tight.

Closing Shift Procedures: Lock Down Numbers Before You Leave

Closing is where 90% of pub managers lose visibility. If you don’t reconcile properly at close, you won’t know whether you had a good day or a bad day until the next morning. By then, the staff who caused the discrepancy have gone home and you can’t ask questions.

Cash Reconciliation

Take a Z-read from your POS (end-of-shift total). This gives you a complete record of every transaction, every void, every refund. Count your till. Reconcile: POS total should equal till count plus your opening float minus any cash-outs. If they don’t match within £5, find the error before you close the till.

Common discrepancies at closing: staff shortchanging customers, forgotten voids, unrecorded card payments, or refunds that weren’t rung through the till. Every one of these has a fix. Your job is to find it that night, not discover it next morning.

Bank your cash if you’re carrying more than £500. Count it into a pay-in envelope, record the amount, seal it, and store it in your safe or a proper cash box. This protects you and creates an audit trail.

Labour Cost Reconciliation

Print a labour report from your POS or labour tracking system. What was your total labour cost today? Divide it by your total sales. That’s your labour percentage. For most pubs, 28-32% is normal. If you’re consistently at 35%+, you have a staffing problem that compounds every single day.

Make a note of who was on shift, what hours they worked, and whether there were any gaps where you were short-staffed or over-staffed. This data feeds into your weekly schedule and prevents the same problems repeating.

Stock and Pour Cost Spot Check

Count your till floats and your opening cash again. Check a couple of key product lines: how many pints of your house lager did you sell? How many spirits? Compare the POS count to what your bar staff say they poured. If the numbers don’t match, you have a pour cost problem.

Pour cost tracking at close means you catch overpouring, giveaways, or spillage while you can address it with staff. If you only discover pour cost issues during your weekly stock take, you’ve already lost 7 days of unreported loss.

Equipment and Security Check

Walk the pub. Check that all doors and windows are locked. Check that the alarm is set correctly. Check that all equipment is switched off — fridges, taps, ovens, lights. A fridge left on overnight in summer costs money. A door left unlocked is a security risk.

Check that your POS system is backed up (most modern systems do this automatically). If you don’t have a backup and your till crashes, you lose your entire day’s data.

Daily Numbers That Actually Matter: Stop Tracking Vanity Metrics

Most pub managers track dozens of metrics and understand none of them. You don’t need a spreadsheet with 50 columns. You need 4-5 numbers that tell you whether your pub is running correctly.

Total Sales

What did you take in today? This is your starting point for everything else. If sales are down 20% compared to the same day last week, you need to know why. Was the weather bad? Did you have fewer staff on? Did a competitor run a promotion? Write it down. Patterns emerge over weeks.

Labour Cost Percentage

This is your biggest controllable cost. Labour percentage = (Total wages / Total sales) × 100. If you sold £1,200 and spent £360 on staff, your labour percentage is 30%. This number should stay consistent day-to-day and week-to-week. If it starts creeping up, you catch it immediately and adjust scheduling.

Staff cost tracking is the single biggest profit-killer most managers ignore until it’s too late. Track it daily.

Pour Cost Variance

Pour cost = (Cost of stock used / Revenue from that stock) × 100. Your target is typically 20-25% for spirits, 18-22% for beer, 28-32% for wine. If your beer pour cost is 28% when it should be 20%, you’re losing £5-10 per day on that category alone. Over a month, that’s £150-300 in hidden loss.

Track this weekly, not just at annual stock take. Weekly tracking lets you catch problems before they become big numbers.

Cash Position

How much cash do you have in your till at the end of the day? Is it balanced? Is it secure? Cash is the most visible indicator of control. If you’re regularly out by £20-50 at close, something is broken in your procedures.

Waste or Giveaway

This is simple: how much stock did you give away or throw away today? This should be close to zero. One broken pint of lager is acceptable. Three broken pints and a free round because you felt like it is a trend that costs real money.

Record spoilage and giveaway separately. Spoilage is a food safety issue. Giveaway is a control issue. Both need fixing, but for different reasons.

Common Manager Mistakes on Daily Checklists (And How to Avoid Them)

Mistake 1: Not Writing Things Down

If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen. Your brain can’t be your system. Use a notebook, a spreadsheet, or a POS management tool — but use something. Write down till discrepancies, stock issues, staffing problems, and customer complaints. Review these notes weekly to find patterns.

Mistake 2: Closing the Till Before Full Reconciliation

Never close your till until you’ve counted it and verified it matches your POS. If you close it and then find a discrepancy, you can’t go back. Staff go home, you can’t ask questions, and the money is gone. Take 10 extra minutes and get it right.

Mistake 3: Ignoring Temperature or Stock Issues

A fridge reading 5°C instead of 3°C doesn’t seem like an emergency. But over a week, that’s spoilt stock. A stock count being 2 bottles off doesn’t seem serious. But 2 off on 50 items means you’re missing 100 bottles monthly. Small issues compound into real money.

Mistake 4: Not Tracking Labour Cost Daily

Labour is your biggest expense. If you only check it weekly or monthly, you’re flying blind for days at a time. Check it every single shift. If you’re over target, adjust immediately — either reduce hours tomorrow or increase sales today.

Mistake 5: Assuming Staff Know the Standards

Don’t assume staff know what you expect. Tell them. Write it down. Show them. Train them. A daily 5-minute briefing takes 250 minutes a month but prevents dozens of service failures that cost you customers and reputation.

How to Automate Your Daily Checklist: Stop Doing Manual Work

Manual checklists work. But they take time. At The Teal Farm, we used to manually track cash, labour, and stock every single day. It took 45 minutes every closing shift. That’s 300+ hours yearly on data entry instead of managing the pub.

The real opportunity is automation. Your POS system already tracks most of what you need. It captures every transaction, every void, every refund. It knows how many staff are clocked in and for how long. Most managers never look at this data because they don’t know it exists or they don’t know how to extract it.

A proper pub management system pulls this data automatically, calculates your key metrics, and shows you them in one place. Instead of spending 45 minutes manually entering numbers into a spreadsheet, you spend 5 minutes reading a dashboard that updates in real-time.

Automated tracking of cash, labour, and stock means you see problems on the day they happen, not three days later when it’s too late to fix.

Specifically, look for systems that offer:

• Automatic POS integration (your till data feeds directly into your reports with zero manual entry)
• Labour cost calculation (clock-in data automatically converts to labour percentage, with alerts if you exceed target)
• Daily reconciliation templates (you enter numbers once and they auto-calculate variances and discrepancies)
• Mobile access (you can check key metrics from anywhere, not just from your office)
• Historical tracking (you can see today vs. last week vs. last year at a glance, not buried in archived spreadsheets)

When you remove the manual data entry, your daily checklist shrinks from 45 minutes to 10-15 minutes. That time difference compounds. Over a year, that’s 25+ hours you get back to actually managing the pub instead of recording data about managing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your daily checklist is not busy work. It’s the foundation of control. Without it, you’re managing by hope instead of by numbers. With it, you catch problems on the day they happen, not three weeks later at the accountant’s office.

The simplest version works: one notebook where you record opening cash, closing cash, labour percentage, and any issues. The best version is automated: a system that feeds your POS data directly into your reports, so you’re reading numbers instead of entering them.

Start with the simple version. If it takes you more than 45 minutes daily, it’s too complicated. If you find yourself unable to answer basic questions — “What was my labour cost yesterday?” or “Did I make money last week?” — then you’re not tracking the right things.

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