Punch Pubs line check: what it covers and why yours matters

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most Punch tenants run a line check once a month, if at all—and that’s exactly where a thousand pounds a month starts leaking away. A line check sounds simple: dip the kegs, weigh the spirits, count the bottles, check it against the till. But the number of pubs that actually do it weekly, the same day, with the same person, is astonishingly small. I ran my own Marston’s pub on a tangle of spreadsheets for three years before I realised I couldn’t actually tell whether I was losing stock or just losing count. Once I built a proper line check routine around a dipstick and a set of scales, my weekly variance went from educated guesswork to a number I could trust within a fortnight. This article walks you through exactly what a line check covers, how to run one that matters, and why the brewery stocktaker’s annual visit won’t catch what’s actually eating your margin.

What is a line check?

A line check is a weekly physical count of all your wet stock—draught kegs, cask, spirits, wine, soft drinks—measured against what the till says you sold that week. It’s not the same as a full stocktake. It’s not the same as a brewery visit. It’s a disciplined, repeatable audit that tells you whether your stock variance is normal or whether something’s wrong.

In a Punch Pubs tenancy, the pubco expects you to understand your stock position. They want to know why a keg’s missing or why your spirits variance is 3% instead of 0.5%. A line check gives you the answer. It also gives you the evidence: a number you can defend, backed by a record of counts and reconciliations.

The name “line check” comes from the lines of draught beer in your cellar—but a proper line check covers everything: cask ales, kegs, spirits (by individual bottle), wine, alcopops, soft drinks, and cordials. If it generates till revenue, it goes into the count.

Why weekly is the only interval that matters

Monthly line checks are too slow. By the time you’ve counted last month’s draught, you’ve already lost the trail. A bad line clean happened on Tuesday. A pump seal failed on Thursday. A staff member free-poured all weekend. If you’re counting on the 1st of next month, you’ll see the damage—but you won’t see where it came from or when. By then, it’s happened again.

A weekly line check, run on the same day and by the same person, lets you spot a drift in the data before it becomes a problem. If your spirits variance is 2% one week, 1.5% the next, and 3% the third week, you know something’s off. You can narrow it down to a specific spirit, a specific shift, maybe even a specific member of staff. A monthly check just gives you a headline number.

I started running my line check every Monday morning before service. It took 90 minutes. By week four, I could do it in 45 minutes because I’d learned where the problem kegs sat, which spirits needed weighing more carefully, and which till categories were unreliable. My variance went from 2–4% monthly to 0.5–1% weekly. That’s not an accident. That’s discipline building accuracy into the system.

What a proper line check actually covers

Draught beer

Every keg, every cask, every line. You need a dipstick—a marked stick that measures liquid depth inside a keg. You measure the depth, cross-reference it against the keg size (half, quarter, ninth), and read off the litres remaining. Record the date, keg ID, product, and remaining volume. If a keg was 50 litres on Monday and 45 litres on Friday, and the till shows 50 pints of that product sold, you’ve got a variance of roughly 3 litres unaccounted for. That’s your cellar waste (bad line cleaning, temperature loss, leaks) plus measurement error.

The till should show you pints sold by product. If it doesn’t, your till is set up wrong, and you can’t run an accurate line check at all. Fix that first.

Spirits (and fortified wine)

Open bottles only. Unopened bottles are inventory, not stock loss. For every open bottle of vodka, gin, rum, whisky, brandy, and fortified wine (port, sherry), you weigh it. A full 70cl bottle of spirits weighs approximately 800g. Every 25ml measure removes roughly 20g. If a bottle that should weigh 600g (20 measures removed) weighs 480g, you’ve got 6 measures unaccounted for. That’s either free-pouring (a bartender pouring a 25ml without using the measure), spillage, or the till category is wrong.

Most stock “theft” is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. A free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml. A spirit measure that catches on the optic and spills—that goes unrecorded. A customer sent back a drink and it was poured down the sink without a void on the till. Weigh open spirit bottles every week, and you’ll see these patterns emerge in real time.

Wine and alcopops

Count bottles by type. Red, white, rosé, sparkling. Alcopops by flavour if you stock them. Don’t overthink it—a bottle count is a bottle count. But if you sell 12 bottles of house red a week and your till shows 8, something’s wrong. It could be till error (the bartender rang in the wrong category), it could be a void that wasn’t recorded, or it could be a bottle that walked out unreported.

Soft drinks and cordials

Count bottles. Measure concentrates by weight if you’re using bags or cartons. Most small pubs don’t lose serious money on cordials, but if you’ve got a big soft drinks business (late-night bar, student pub), it matters.

Cask ales

Record the cask ID, product, and remaining volume. Same dipstick method as kegs. If you run cask, you know cask variance is always higher than kegs because of the sediment and the way ale sits in a stillage. Budget for 1–2% variance on cask alone. If you’re running 3–4%, something’s wrong—bad temperature control, a poorly sealed keystone, or overfilled measures.

Where stock loss really hides

Spirits hide losses in over-pouring. Draught hides it in poor cellar temperature and bad line cleaning waste. Most stock “theft” is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage.

Here’s what I’ve found in 15 years of running pubs:

• Over-pouring (spirits, wine, alcopops). A bartender reaches for a 25ml measure but pours by eye instead. A customer asks for a generous pour. A staff member is generous on their own drink. That’s not theft—it’s unmeasured generosity. Weigh every open bottle every week, and you’ll see this instantly.
• Line cleaning waste. A proper line clean uses cold water and a chemical. Three to four litres per line per clean, depending on line length. If you’re running 10 lines and cleaning twice a week, that’s 60–80 litres of product down the drain every week. It should be recorded as waste, not as stock loss. Most pubs don’t record it at all.
• Cellar temperature. Warm cellars lose product to volatilisation (the alcohol literally evaporates). Cold cellars (below 8°C) are fine. Cellars that drift between 10°C and 16°C lose 0.5–1% a week just to temperature swings. Fix your cellar temperature, and you’ll see your variance drop by 0.5–1% immediately.
• Till error. A bartender rang in house red when it was a premium red. A void wasn’t entered correctly. A till category is set to the wrong selling price. These cascade into variance that looks like stock loss but is actually accounting error. Run a till audit alongside your line check.
• Forgotten void records. A customer sent back a drink. It was poured down the sink. No void was entered. No waste record was kept. The till shows the sale, but the stock isn’t there. You’ll see this when your till sales don’t match your stock count.

The number that actually matters is wet GP by line, not a single headline stock figure. If your draught GP is 65%, your spirits GP is 50%, and your wine GP is 45%, you know which lines are profitable and which are bleeding margin. A single headline stock variance figure (e.g. “I’m 2% down”) tells you nothing about where the money’s actually going.

How to build a line check that works

Step 1: Pick a day and a person

Run your line check on the same day every week, at the same time, and by the same person if possible. Monday morning before service is ideal. You get a full week of data (Friday through Sunday included), and you’ve got time to investigate before the next order arrives. The same person builds muscle memory and consistency—they learn where the difficult measurements are and how to avoid errors.

Step 2: Record everything

Use a spreadsheet, a clipboard, or a dedicated app. The tool doesn’t matter—consistency matters. Record the date, the product, the measurement (litres, weight, bottle count), and the till sales figure for the same period. Do this reconciliation the same day. Don’t let it drift.

I used a printed sheet for the first two years, then moved to a spreadsheet when I realised I was spending 30 minutes a week manually transferring numbers. A dedicated app like the StockTap pub stock app is faster because it syncs with your till and does the variance calculation for you, but a spreadsheet works if you’re disciplined about it.

Step 3: Measure accurately

A dipstick for kegs and casks. A set of scales for spirits (a digital kitchen scale, 2kg capacity, costs £15). A bottle count for wine and alcopops. Get familiar with the equipment. Test it. A dipstick that’s bent or marked incorrectly will throw your numbers off every single week.

I bought a cheap dipstick from a homebrew website (cost £8) and it lasted five years. I still use it. Learn how to read it—the meniscus can be tricky if you’re not careful. Take your time. A measurement that takes an extra 30 seconds but is accurate is worth more than a fast guess.

Step 4: Reconcile against till data the same day

This is non-negotiable. Pull the till data for the exact same period (Monday to Sunday, or Friday to Thursday—pick one and stick with it). Compare the number of units sold (pints of draught, measures of spirits, bottles of wine) against what’s physically missing from stock. The gap is your variance. Record it.

If the till shows 100 pints of bitter sold but your dipstick says 110 litres are missing (102 pints equivalent), you’ve got an 8-pint variance. Is that cellar waste? A till error? A measurement mistake? Start investigating the same day, while the data is fresh.

Step 5: Investigate trends, not outliers

One bad week is noise. Four bad weeks in a row is a problem. If your spirits variance is 0.8% every week except for one week when it jumps to 3%, find out what happened that week (new bartender, a busy event, a till error) and move on. If it jumps to 2% every Saturday night, you’ve found a real problem—probably over-pouring during busy service.

Tools and equipment you actually need

You don’t need fancy equipment to run a proper line check. I started with three things:

• A dipstick (£8–£15). Buy one from a homebrew supplier or a catering equipment company. It should have clear markings for half-barrels, quarters, and ninths.
• A digital kitchen scale, 2kg capacity (£10–£20). Accurate to 1g. Test it against a known weight before you rely on it.
• A spreadsheet or notebook (free). Record every measurement. Don’t rely on memory.

Optional but useful:

• A thermometer for your cellar (£5). Record the temperature every week. You’ll spot temperature drift that’s affecting your stock.
• A dedicated stock app. The SmartPubTools suite includes cellar tracking tools that sync with your till, but you can run an effective line check with a spreadsheet if you’re disciplined about the data entry.

Don’t buy expensive equipment. Don’t get a cloud-based beer tracking system with subscriptions. Start simple: a dipstick, a scale, a record. Build the discipline first. The tools can follow.

A proper line check is not complicated. It’s just repeatable. Most pubs that move from a messy spreadsheet to a disciplined count—same day, same person, till reconciliation—claw back 1–2 GP points within a couple of months. That’s real money. In a £500k turnover pub, 1 GP point is £5,000 a year. Most pubs lose exactly that amount to stock variance they don’t understand because they’re not running a proper line check.