Admiral Taverns stock check: weekly routine
Last updated: 26 June 2026
Running this problem at your pub?
Here's the system I use at The Teal Farm to fix it — real-time labour %, cash position, and VAT liability in one dashboard. 30-minute setup. £97 once, no monthly fees.
Get Pub Command Centre — £97 →No monthly fees. 30-day money-back guarantee. Built by a working pub landlord.
Most pub licensees running an Admiral Taverns tied house don’t actually know if their stock variance is three per cent or half a per cent — they just assume the brewery stocktaker will catch anything serious. That assumption costs you money every single week. A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year, and most of it isn’t theft — it’s measurement error, over-pouring, and wastage that nobody bothered to write down. The good news: you don’t need to be a wizard to fix it. You need a simple routine you can run in 30 minutes every Friday or Monday morning, the same way you check the tills. This article walks you through exactly what an Admiral Taverns stock check should look like, what equipment matters, and how to turn guesswork into a number you can actually trust.
Key Takeaways
- A proper weekly Admiral Taverns stock check takes 30 minutes and requires only a dipstick, scales, and a notebook — no expensive equipment needed.
- Most stock loss in pubs is not theft; it is over-pouring (a free-poured 25ml spirit is often 32–35ml), cellar temperature waste, and forgotten wastage that was never recorded.
- Weigh every open spirit bottle, dip every cask and partial keg, and reconcile against till data on the same day to catch errors before they compound.
- A typical pub moving from spreadsheet guesswork to a disciplined weekly count claws back 1–2 gross profit points within two months.
Why Admiral Taverns pubs leak stock
The number that actually matters is wet GP by line, not a single headline stock figure. Most Admiral Taverns licensees run a monthly or quarterly stocktake and compare it to a COGS (cost of goods sold) number from the till. If there’s a gap, they assume it’s shrinkage and move on. What they miss is that the shrinkage is usually not one thing — it’s three separate problems that all point to different lines.
Spirits hide losses in over-pouring. A 25ml measure is a 25ml measure only if you’re using a jigger or optic every single time. Free-pouring under pressure or at busy times drifts to 32–35ml per serve without anyone noticing. Over a week, a single spirit line can lose 2–3 litres to over-measurement alone. That’s not a till error; it’s a pouring discipline error.
Draught hides losses in poor cellar temperature and bad line cleaning waste. A cask that sits too warm for three days will pour turbid, and you’ll throw away 5–10 litres. A keg connector that leaks 50ml a day looks like nothing in one day, but it’s 300ml a week. And if your font lines aren’t cleaned properly, you’re pouring cloudy product and having to dump it without writing it down.
Most stock ‘theft’ is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. The second you accept that, you stop looking for the thief and start looking at your process. That’s when you find the real numbers.
The equipment you actually need
You don’t need a computerised till system or a specialist app to run a proper stock check. You need three things: something to weigh spirits, something to measure draught, and something to write it down.
Spirits
Buy a set of kitchen scales (digital, 0–5kg range, around £15–25). Weigh every open bottle at the same time each week. Record the weight. The following week, weigh again. The difference tells you what left the bottle. Compare that to what your till says you sold at the measured price per serve, and you’ve got your variance. You don’t need to know the density of vodka; you just need to know that the same bottle, weighed on the same scales, tells you the truth week on week.
Draught
A dipstick (a calibrated plastic rod marked in litres, £8–12) goes into every cask and partial keg. You push it to the bottom and read the depth. Record it. Next week, dip again. The difference is what you sold or lost. Alternatively, if you’re running soft drink kegs or CO2, record the reading on the regulator pressure gauge — but that only works if your cellar temperature is stable (which it should be).
Recording
A notebook or a simple spreadsheet. Nothing fancy. Date, line, opening weight/depth, closing weight/depth, difference, expected sales from till, variance. That’s the row. Run the same rows every week and you’ll spot trends faster than you can blink.
At my own 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. The moment you move from “I think we’re fine” to “I know we’re fine”, you start clawing back cash.
The weekly stock check routine
Set a day and time. Friday afternoon before close, or Monday morning before service. Do it the same time every week so it becomes part of the rhythm, not an afterthought.
Step 1: Spirits (10 minutes)
- Gather all open bottles — vodka, gin, rum, whisky, brandy, everything.
- Weigh each one on the scales. Write down the weight and the bottle name.
- Multiply the weight loss (in ml, assuming 0.9g per ml for spirits) by the cost per serve you pay, divided by your measure (25ml).
- Cross-check against the till. Did the till record that many serves? If not, you’ve got over-pouring. If the till shows more, you’ve got a till error or a discount that wasn’t logged.
Step 2: Draught (10 minutes)
- Go to the cellar. Check the temperature (it should be 10–12°C for ale, colder for lager).
- Dip every cask and partial keg. Write down the depth in litres.
- If you have soft drink or CO2 kegs, record the regulator pressure.
- Compare last week’s reading to this week’s. The difference is consumption.
- Cross-check against the till. A 10-pint firkin selling 30 pints a week is losing 5 pints — either they’re pouring shorts, the till is under-ringing, or there’s wastage you forgot to log.
Step 3: Wastage log (5 minutes)
Any line you dumped, any keg you had to pull because it was off, any spirit you spilled, any empties or short measures — write it down right there. If you changed a font line or flushed the system, write it down. Every wastage entry shows as a line item variance, not as mysterious shrinkage.
Step 4: Cross-check against till (5 minutes)
Pull your till report for the week. Compare “pints of Guinness sold” to “Guinness consumption” (last week’s dip minus this week’s dip). Compare “vodka serves sold” to “vodka weight loss divided by 25ml per serve”. The variance for each line is the thing you care about. If it’s more than 2–3%, something is wrong.
How to spot real problems vs. measurement noise
A single bad week doesn’t mean you have a problem; a trend means you do. Run the same count for four weeks. You’ll see the natural noise in your system — a cold snap, a quiet week, a big event. Once you’ve got a baseline, you can see when something actually changes.
If your vodka variance is consistently +5% (selling more than your weight loss suggests), your optics are under-measuring or your till is under-ringing. If it’s consistently –5% (weight loss more than till suggests), you’re over-pouring or pouring free measures you’re not charging for.
If your Guinness line jumps from –1% to +8% in one week, ask yourself: Did I change the font line? Did we have a party? Did the cellar get warm? Most variance has a reason. Find the reason, and you stop guessing.
Here’s an insight most publicans miss: SmartPubTools products exist because variance tracking alone isn’t enough. You need to see the variance by line, by week, and then correlate it to your gross profit. A 2% variance on a £50k annual wet sales is £1,000. You need to know which line is losing it, when it started, and how much you’ve already lost this year. A spreadsheet can do that, but StockTap pub stock app does it in half the time with less chance of transcription error.
Common reasons weekly checks fail
Objection: “I don’t have time to stocktake every week”
A proper weekly check takes 30 minutes. A monthly stocktake takes 2–3 hours and you usually have to close the bar or do it before opening. You also get one data point a month instead of four. Which saves you time? The answer is the weekly routine every single time. Once you’ve done it three times, you’re running on autopilot.
Objection: “My spreadsheet works fine”
Does it? Or does it work fine until you realise you’ve miscalculated the weight conversion, or you forgot a wastage entry, or someone else interpreted “closing stock” differently than you did? A spreadsheet is a good place to record numbers, but it’s not a reminder system. It won’t flag that your Stella line is trending up 3% month on month. It won’t tell you which shift has the highest variance. The moment you want to ask a question beyond “what was the number last week”, a spreadsheet starts to fail you.
Objection: “Do I really need special equipment?”
You need scales (£20) and a dipstick (£10). That’s it. You probably already have a pen and paper. If you think that’s too much to spend to protect £3,000–£5,000 in annual profit, you’re not being serious about running the pub.
Objection: “Won’t the brewery stocktaker just do it?”
The brewery stocktaker comes once a quarter (or annually for Admiral Taverns estates). By then, you’re three months into not knowing your variance, and the number they report is already history. They’re also checking the pub’s debt to the pubco, not your operational health. You need to know your stock variance weekly because that’s the only way to catch a problem before it costs you a week’s worth of GP.
Objection: “Is an app safer than a spreadsheet for my records?”
A spreadsheet on your phone or laptop is not backed up unless you back it up. An app that syncs to a server is safer because you can’t lose the data if your phone breaks. But the real answer is: use whatever system you’ll actually use every week. If you hate apps, a notebook is fine as long as you photograph the pages. If you live on your phone, an app is better. The format doesn’t matter; the consistency does.
Recording and acting on your numbers
The point of running a weekly stock check isn’t to have a folder full of data. It’s to spot when something changes and then fix it before it becomes a month-long problem.
Every Friday (or whenever you run your check), calculate the variance for each line. Plot it. If a line is consistently over or under by more than 3%, that’s a conversation with your staff or a look at your process.
If spirits are over (weight loss less than till suggests), your measures are right-sized and you’re not giving free pours — that’s good. If spirits are under by 5%, your free-pouring culture is costing you money; tighten up the jigger use or install optics on those lines.
If draught is over (cask consumption less than till suggests), your taps are short-measuring or your till is over-ringing; check your font calibration and your staff training. If draught is under by more than 2% (and your cellar is cold and clean), you’ve got a line leak, bad pint quality that’s being thrown away, or unlogged wastage.
The moment you move from spreadsheet guesswork to a disciplined weekly count, most pubs claw back 1–2 gross profit points within two months. That’s not because you suddenly become magical; it’s because you stop flying blind.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I run a stock check in an Admiral Taverns pub?
Once a week, on the same day and time, takes 30 minutes and gives you four data points a month to spot trends. Monthly stocktakes are too slow to catch problems before they compound into real losses. Weekly is the industry standard for tied houses that care about their margins.
What does a 2% variance actually mean?
A 2% variance on £50,000 annual wet sales (a small pub) is £1,000. On a £100,000 pub, it’s £2,000. That’s real money. A 1% variance is often considered acceptable noise, but anything above 2% consistently is worth investigating and fixing.
Can I use a spreadsheet instead of an app for stock tracking?
Yes, a spreadsheet works fine if you actually use it every week and you don’t make calculation errors. The risk is transcription mistakes and the inability to spot trends at a glance. An app removes the calculation step and usually flags out-of-range variance automatically, but either method is better than no check at all.
Why does my draught variance change week to week?
Cellar temperature changes, line cleaning quality, how clean your font taps are, whether you had an event that week, and even the time of year affect draught consumption and waste. Run four weeks of checks to establish your baseline, then you can spot when the variance shifts outside your normal range.
Should I involve my staff in the weekly stock check?
Yes. If your variance is consistently high on the Friday night shift, your staff on that shift need to know. Not as an accusation, but as information. Most over-pouring and short-measuring is not malicious; it’s habit or carelessness. When staff see the numbers, behaviour usually improves. Transparency works.
You now know how to run a proper Admiral Taverns stock check, but tracking variance week on week is only half the game.
£97 once. No subscription. No monthly fees. Works on any device.
Running your pub on gut feel?
The Pub Command Centre gives you wet GP%, cellar checks, staff cost and weekly P&L — from your phone, every shift. £97 once. No subscription.
See the Pub Command Centre →