Last updated: 2 May 2026
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Most pub licensees don’t actually know if they made money last week — and that’s the problem. You might have £2,000 in the till and think you’ve had a great week, but labour, stock waste, and pubco payments could mean you’re actually down £400. Pub weekly accounts aren’t optional extras for accountants — they’re the only way you’ll know whether your business is working or whether you’re just busy and broke. This guide explains what you need to track, how to read the numbers that matter, and why the pubs pulling away from the competition are the ones checking their accounts every single week. You’ll learn exactly what a real weekly P&L should look like, how to spot the profit leaks before they become disasters, and why your gut feeling about how well you’re doing is almost always wrong.
Key Takeaways
- Weekly accounts show you profit or loss in real time, so you can fix problems before they become expensive habits.
- The three numbers that matter most are: total sales, labour cost percentage, and gross profit after stock waste.
- Labour should sit between 15–22% of sales in a well-run pub; anything above 25% means you have a staffing problem you need to fix immediately.
- Your EPOS system tells you what sold, but your weekly accounts tell you whether you actually made money — these are not the same thing.
What Are Pub Weekly Accounts?
A pub weekly account is a simple profit and loss statement that covers seven days of trading. It shows your total sales, what you paid out, and what you actually kept. That’s it. Nothing complicated. The fact that most UK pubs don’t do this is wild, but it’s the reason most licensees are surprised when their annual accounts come back and show they’ve made less than they thought.
Weekly accounts are the earliest warning system you have. If you wait until the end of the month, or worse, until the accountant sends the annual figures in March, you’ve already locked in eight weeks of losses or inefficiencies you could have fixed. I run Teal Farm Pub with 180 covers, and I check my weekly numbers every Monday morning. If last week’s labour was 27%, I know exactly which shifts cost too much and why. If my gross margin dropped, I can see whether it’s a stock-taking issue, a till error, or an actual pricing problem. By Wednesday, I’ve fixed it. That’s the difference between a pub that breaks even and one that makes real money.
The pubs that are genuinely successful — not just busy — are the ones where the licensee knows their numbers better than they know their regulars’ names. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. You can’t feel your way to profitability.
The Core Numbers You Need to Track
You don’t need to track 47 different metrics. You need to track five, and if those five are wrong, everything else is pointless. These are the numbers I look at every single week, and the ones that actually tell you whether your business is working.
1. Total Sales (Revenue)
This is the easiest number to get because your EPOS system tells you. But separate it into wet sales (drinks) and dry sales (food, snacks, anything else). A lot of pubs collapse their numbers together, which means they don’t see if one part of the business is dragging the other down. At Teal Farm, I run quiz nights, match days, and food service alongside regular trading. If I don’t split the revenue, I won’t know whether the quiz nights are actually profitable or just shifting stock at a loss.
2. Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) — Wet and Dry
This is your stock cost for the week. What you paid for the beer, spirits, wine, and food that sold. Your EPOS should tell you this if it’s properly integrated with your stock control, but a lot of pubs estimate it or ignore it completely. The moment you stop counting COGS properly, you stop knowing your actual profit. Your pubco might give you a target margin (usually 65–70% on drinks, 60–65% on food), but you won’t know if you’re hitting it without counting the stock out.
3. Gross Profit (Sales minus COGS)
This is what you’ve got left after you’ve paid for the stock. Your pubco will take a percentage of this for rent, services, and fees. Your landlord (if you’re not tied) takes rent. But this is the only pool of money you have to pay wages, utilities, rates, and keep for yourself. If your gross profit is 35% of sales on a £4,000 week, you’ve got £1,400 to work with. Everything else comes out of that.
4. Labour Cost (Total Wages as a % of Sales)
This is the single biggest variable in pub profitability, and it’s where most licensees lose control. The UK hospitality benchmark is 25–30% of sales, but frankly, that’s too high if you want to make decent money. At Teal Farm, I’m averaging 15% against that benchmark, and that’s why 2025 was my best revenue year since taking on the pub. Labour cost percentage is calculated like this: (Total wages paid for the week ÷ Total sales) × 100. If you paid £600 in wages on a £3,000 week, that’s 20%. If the same £600 came in on a £2,500 week, that’s 24%. Same wages, different result. This is why busy weeks save you money — they don’t just generate more sales, they spread your fixed staffing cost thinner.
5. Operating Profit (Gross Profit minus Labour and Overheads)
This is what’s left after you’ve paid your people and your basic running costs (utilities, supplies, cleaning, maintenance). This is your profit before pubco fees and tax. This is the number that tells you whether the business is actually working or whether you’re just running a busy loss-maker.
When you’re evaluating a pub opportunity, use a pub profit margin calculator to model what these five numbers should look like before you sign anything. Most licensees don’t, which is why they’re shocked six months in.
How to Read Your Weekly P&L Without Getting Lost
The layout matters less than the discipline. You can use a spreadsheet, your EPOS system’s built-in reporting, or dedicated pub software. What matters is that you do it the same way every single week, and you compare it to the same week last year and the previous week. Trends are what kill pubs, not one bad week.
Here’s what a stripped-back weekly P&L looks like:
- Sales: Wet £2,100 | Dry £900 | Total £3,000
- COGS: Wet £630 (30%) | Dry £270 (30%) | Total £900
- Gross Profit: £2,100 (70% of sales)
- Labour: £480 (16% of sales)
- Utilities, rates, supplies: £250
- Operating Profit (before pubco fees): £1,370
On a £3,000 week, if you’re clearing £1,370 before the pubco takes their cut, you’ve got a solid pub. Most pubs don’t track this far, which is why they have no idea what they’re actually keeping.
The second thing you need to do is compare like-for-like weeks. You can’t compare Week 10 to Week 9 if Week 9 had a quiz night and Week 10 didn’t. Compare Week 10 this year to Week 10 last year. That tells you whether your pub is getting stronger or weaker.
The number that should move most between weeks is sales; everything else should stay relatively stable or improve. If labour is jumping between 18% and 25% week-on-week, you don’t have a sales problem — you have a scheduling problem. If COGS is creeping up from 30% to 32%, you have a stock waste or theft problem. These are fixable. But you have to see them first, and you won’t see them if you’re not looking at your numbers every week.
Labour Costs: Where Most Pubs Lose Money
I’m putting this in its own section because labour is where nearly every pub I’ve worked in or consulted with has been quietly haemorrhaging money for months without realising it. Your staff are your biggest cost. Most pubs treat scheduling like an afterthought and then wonder why they’re not making money.
The problem is simple: you staff for your busiest week, not your average week. So you’ve got a bartender, a kitchen person, and management cover for a Saturday. That’s correct on Saturday. It’s catastrophic on a Tuesday. But you’ve scheduled them anyway because they asked for the hours, or you didn’t think it through.
Labour cost percentage tells you immediately whether you’re overstaffed. Here’s the truth: if you’re consistently running 20% or lower on labour, you might not have enough staff. Your team will be burned out, quality drops, and you’ll lose customers. If you’re consistently above 25%, you have too many people on the rota, or the wrong people in the roles you’re paying them for. The sweet spot is 18–22%.
At Teal Farm, I got to 15% because I was ruthless about:
- Not scheduling cover for quiet shifts — I cover them myself or run with a skeleton crew
- Linking rotas to predicted sales (events, weather, day of week all matter)
- Paying premium rates during genuinely busy periods and reducing rates during quiet ones
- Cutting hours the moment a team member wasn’t pulling their weight — this sounds harsh, but it’s actually fair, because it keeps your overheads down and your remaining staff earning better tips
Your weekly accounts will show you labour as a percentage. If it’s creeping up, pull your rota apart and find out why. Don’t wait three months. The money’s already gone.
For rotas themselves, understand that pub staff rota legal requirements in 2026 include the 48-hour working week limit, holiday entitlement accrual, and notice periods for shift changes. Build your rotas around these constraints, not the other way around, or you’ll face legal costs on top of overstaffing costs.
Why Monthly Accounts Come Too Late
Some larger pubs do monthly accounts. A few do daily accounts. The weekly rhythm is the sweet spot for most UK licensees because it’s frequent enough to catch problems, but not so frequent that you’re doing admin instead of running your pub.
Here’s why monthly doesn’t work: imagine your labour jumped to 28% in Week 2 of the month. If you’re doing monthly accounts, you don’t see it until Week 5 when you sit down to add it all up. By then, you’ve had four weeks of 28% labour, which on a £3,000 average week costs you an extra £240 per week you didn’t need to spend. That’s £960 you’ll never get back, in a month, before you even know it happened.
With weekly accounts, you see it on Monday of Week 3, and you fix it by Wednesday. You lose one week’s bad decision instead of four.
The weekly cadence also forces you to build a habit of checking your numbers. If you only look at your accounts once a month, you’re treating it like a chore. If you do it every Monday morning with a coffee, it becomes part of your week. You start noticing patterns. You start making quicker decisions. You start running your pub like a business instead of waiting for surprises.
Setting Up Weekly Accounts in Your Pub
You need three things: a data source, a template, and a discipline. Let me break these down.
Data Source
Your EPOS system should spit out total sales and, ideally, COGS. If it doesn’t, you’re using the wrong system. When I was evaluating best pub EPOS systems guide for Teal Farm, I tested systems handling wet sales, dry sales, quiz nights, and match day events simultaneously. The ones that didn’t give me clean weekly reporting were immediately out. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
For labour, your payroll system should export hours and wages by week. If you’re paying staff in cash or informally, you’re not just risking an HMRC audit — you’re not tracking your actual costs at all. Formalise this immediately.
Template
You can use Excel, Google Sheets, or pub-specific software. The template itself matters far less than consistency. Use the same rows, the same order, every single week. This makes comparison automatic and catches anomalies faster. Most licensees over-complicate this. Five sections (Sales, COGS, Gross Profit, Labour, Operating Profit) is enough.
Discipline
This is the hardest part. You have to actually sit down and do it. I do mine Monday mornings, 8 a.m., before the pub gets busy. Twenty minutes. Non-negotiable. If you wait until Friday, you’ve had five days to forget what drove the numbers, and you’ll just file it away without learning anything.
Once you’re running weekly accounts, the next step is understanding the full financial picture. Your EPOS tells you what sold. Your accounts tell you what profit you made. But Pub Command Centre tells you your real-time labour %, VAT liability, cash position, and stock position — all in one place. That’s the difference between knowing you made a loss and knowing exactly where and why. £97 once, no monthly fees, no lock-in.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I do pub weekly accounts?
Weekly is the standard. It gives you enough data to spot trends without losing the detail of what happened in each individual week. Daily accounts are overkill for most pubs; monthly accounts come too late to catch problems when they’re still small. Start with weekly on the same day every week — Monday morning is ideal because it covers Sunday trade and gives you the full picture of the previous seven days.
What should labour cost percentage be in a UK pub?
The hospitality benchmark is 25–30%, but that’s high. A well-run pub should be 18–22%. If you can consistently hit 15–18%, you’re in the top tier of profitability. The lowest-cost pubs (typically one-person operators or those with very tight scheduling) run at 10–15%, but this often comes at the cost of quality or owner burnout. Track your percentage weekly and adjust staffing if it stays above 25% for more than two weeks in a row.
What’s the difference between gross profit and operating profit?
Gross profit is sales minus the cost of stock (COGS). Operating profit is gross profit minus labour and running costs like utilities and supplies. Gross profit tells you how efficient your pricing and stock management are. Operating profit tells you whether the business is actually making money after you’ve paid everyone and kept the lights on. You need both numbers to understand your real profitability.
Why do my weekly accounts not match my EPOS sales figures?
The most common reason is timing. Your EPOS might close at midnight, but you might be counting accounts from Monday 6 a.m. to Sunday 6 p.m. — that’s a one-day mismatch that creates a £200–£500 difference on most pubs. The second reason is that your EPOS might include VAT and your accounts might not, or vice versa. Clarify which numbers your EPOS gives you (gross, net, per-category), and build your template around that definition. Once you’ve reconciled once, you’ll do it the same way every week.
Can I do weekly accounts if I’m a tied tenant with a pubco?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, you should do them more carefully. Your pubco will report your sales to you, but they’re not going to tell you where your profit is leaking. When I took on Teal Farm under a Marston’s CRP agreement three years ago, I knew I needed to understand my own numbers independently. Weekly accounts showed me that my labour cost was the issue, not my sales. My pubco BDM was talking about volume; my accounts showed me that profitability was a staffing problem. The pubco sells the dream; your weekly accounts sell the reality. That gap is worth knowing about.
Understanding your weekly accounts tells you where the money goes — but what it doesn’t tell you is where the money actually ends up in your bank account.
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