CRP Pub Stock Control: What Actually Works

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most pubs are losing money on stock control without realising it, because they’re measuring the wrong thing. You can have a “perfect” stocktake count and still be haemorrhaging margin on wet sales — and nobody notices until the P&L looks wrong at month-end. That’s the gap where CRP stock control (cellar reconciliation process) sits: not as a quarterly ceremony, but as a weekly discipline that actually protects your GP.

If you’re running on spreadsheets, hand-written counts or brewery-led stocktakes alone, you’re flying blind on the losses that matter most. The number that actually matters is wet GP by line, not a single headline stock figure — and that requires discipline on three things: what you pour, what you measure, and what the till says happened. This article shows you exactly how to build that discipline without turning stock control into a second job.

What Is CRP Stock Control?

CRP stands for Cellar Reconciliation Process. It’s not fancy — it’s a weekly count routine that measures opening stock, closing stock, and what the till says you sold, then spots the gap. That gap is either measurement error, wastage you forgot to log, over-pouring, or theft. Most of the time it’s the first three.

The core principle is simple: the only way to know if you’re losing stock is to measure it consistently, the same way, every week. This isn’t about catching someone with their hand in the till — it’s about building a financial control that tells you whether your margins are real or fiction.

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. That’s CRP in practice.

Why Weekly Counts Beat Monthly Stocktakes

A quarterly or monthly full stocktake tells you the total damage, but by then the money is gone. A weekly count tells you the damage is happening, so you can fix it while the month is still open.

Here’s the math: if you’re losing 1% on wet sales and you only count every 28 days, you’ve already lost 4 weeks of margin by the time you see it. If you count weekly, you catch it in week one and fix it by week two. The difference is real money.

Weekly counts also catch seasonality and staff variance. You might see that Tuesdays have higher wastage than Thursdays, or that one member of staff over-pours spirits by 0.3ml per serve. Monthly counts hide that signal completely. Weekly counts make it visible.

And here’s something most licensees don’t realise: a brewery stocktaker is there to protect the brewery’s interests, not yours. They’re checking that you’ve paid for what you’ve been invoiced. They’re not checking whether you’re pouring it correctly or whether your cellar temperature is wasting 2% through spoilage. That’s your job. CRP is how you do it.

The Three Hidden Losses Most Pubs Ignore

Loss 1: Over-Pouring in Spirits

A 25ml free-poured measure is almost never 25ml. Honest pouring tends to be 27–30ml. Bad pouring — or generous ones — sits at 32–35ml. Over a week, across a range of products, that’s real stock variance that your till doesn’t explain.

Spirits are the highest-margin part of your wet sales, so a 3ml overpour on 40 pours of vodka per week costs you about £8 in GP. Multiply that across gin, rum, whisky, brandy and everything else, and you’re losing £40–£60 a week from pouring alone. That’s £2,000–£3,000 a year.

The fix is simple: weigh every open spirit bottle at the end of each week. You know the weight of a full bottle. You know the weight of the bottle itself. You can calculate exactly how many millilitres came out, then compare that to what the till says you sold. When they don’t match, you’ve found your loss.

Loss 2: Draught Temperature and Line Waste

If your cellar is sitting at 14°C instead of 11°C, you’re getting faster gas diffusion out of your casks, faster oxidation, and more waste from foaming and rejection. A half-degree matters. And if your beer lines haven’t been cleaned properly, your first pint of the day is foam and waste.

Draught losses also hide in keg changes. A 11-gallon keg holds 10.5 gallons of saleable product — but if your first pint out is foam, you’re losing 0.2–0.3 gallons per keg change. That’s invisible unless you count it.

Most pubs don’t measure this. They assume draught loss is “normal” and budget for it at 3–5%. In reality, with proper temperature control and line maintenance, it should be 1.5–2%. The difference is money.

Loss 3: Forgotten Wastage and Spillage

Someone drops a bottle of Guinness. Someone pours a pint and it goes flat so they tip it away. A keg is tapped and nothing comes out so it’s rejected. These things get logged, or they don’t. If they’re not logged in the till — because the person who wasted it was in a rush — then your stock count shows a loss that never made it to your waste record.

This isn’t theft. It’s just the gap between what people remember to log and what actually happened. A CRP weekly count forces you to account for that gap properly.

Dipping, Weighing and Reconciliation: The Method

CRP has four steps. Do them in this order, every week, on the same day (I use Tuesday mornings).

Step 1: Dip All Casks and Kegs

Use a dipstick or calibrated measure. Record the depth of liquid in every cask and partial keg in your cellar. This gives you a closing stock figure for draught. Compare it to your opening figure from last week, add deliveries, subtract sales (from the till), and you have your draught variance.

Record in the same format every week. A spreadsheet, a notebook, or — more reliably — StockTap pub stock app, which lets you log dips and keep a running variance trend.

Step 2: Weigh All Open Spirits

Take every spirit bottle that’s open (not sealed/backup stock). Weigh it. Record the weight. Compare it to last week’s closing weight, add deliveries from invoices, subtract till sales, and you have your spirits variance.

You’ll need a digital scale (£15–£40). Don’t overthink it. Record to the nearest gram.

Step 3: Log Waste and Spillage

Go through your waste log. Add any spillage or wastage that wasn’t logged in the till. This becomes your “declared waste” figure. It explains some of your variance legitimately.

Step 4: Reconcile and Investigate

Take your closing stock count (from dips and weights), add declared waste, subtract till sales, and compare to your opening stock. Any gap larger than 0.5–1% needs investigation. Too large and you have a problem. Too small and your control is working.

The SmartPubTools platform makes this reconciliation automatic if you log your numbers — it calculates variance instantly and flags lines that are trending badly.

Equipment You Actually Need (And Don’t)

You don’t need much to run CRP properly.

• A dipstick (£5–£10): Measure cask depth. Non-negotiable. Don’t guess.
• A digital scale (£20–£40): For weighing spirit bottles. Get one that reads to 100g accuracy.
• A notebook or app (£0–£97): To log numbers consistently. Paper works. An app is faster and won’t get lost.
• A till that separates waste codes from sales: You already have this, most likely. Just use it properly.
• A thermometer (£5): For your cellar. Not CRP-critical, but essential for spotting draught loss causes.

You don’t need smart kegs, IoT sensors, or a cloud-based inventory system. You need discipline and consistency.

Answering the Objections I Hear Every Week

“I Don’t Have Time for a Weekly Count”

A proper CRP takes about 20 minutes once you’ve got a routine: 10 minutes in the cellar, 10 minutes writing numbers up. That’s £40–£60 a week in recovered margin on average. You do the maths on your own time value.

The real reason pubs skip this isn’t time — it’s that they don’t see the result instantly. You’re not “busy” in the sense that things are happening to you. It’s invisible work. But invisible work that saves you £2,000–£4,000 a year is the most profitable thing you can do.

“My Spreadsheet Works Fine”

A spreadsheet doesn’t flag trends. It doesn’t highlight which spirit line is drifting. It doesn’t force consistency. And if someone’s using it differently each week, you’re comparing apples to oranges.

A spreadsheet also lives on someone’s laptop. If they leave, it leaves. If your till is on a different system, reconciliation becomes manual and slow.

“Do I Really Need Special Equipment?”

Not really. You can dip a cask with a ruler and measure spirits with a bathroom scale. But accuracy matters. A half-degree error in dipstick reading, repeated across 12 casks, throws your whole count off. A scale accurate to 1kg instead of 100g makes spirits reconciliation worthless. Small investment, real accuracy.

“Won’t the Brewery Stocktaker Just Do It?”

The brewery stocktaker checks total volume against invoices. They don’t check whether you’re over-pouring, they don’t measure temperature loss, and they don’t reconcile against your till. They’re there to make sure you haven’t nicked a cask. That’s it.

Your CRP is the early warning system. Their stocktake is the audit.

“Is an App Safer Than a Spreadsheet?”

Yes, on two counts. First, the data is cloud-backed, so it doesn’t disappear. Second, you can set user permissions so only you can change numbers retroactively — it’s an audit trail, not a blank sheet. That’s both protection against staff error and a defensible record if anything goes wrong.