Stock taking for a bar: weekly counts that actually work

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most bar owners discover stock loss only when the brewery’s stocktaker arrives with a variance you can’t explain. By then, you’ve already bled thousands through measurement error, over-pouring, and forgotten wastage that a simple weekly count would have caught within a fortnight. Stock taking for a bar isn’t about being suspicious of staff — it’s about knowing your wet GP by line, not just a headline stock figure that obscures where the actual loss lives. A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year. A proper weekly line check catches it.

The pain point is real: you run on tight margins, your time is fractured between the bar, staff, and compliance, and a spreadsheet that once worked now leaves you guessing whether you’re losing money to cellar temperature, pint glass creep, or a faulty till bell. This article walks you through a count routine you can actually run in under an hour every week, using tools you probably already have, that will show you where the leaks are.

I built this method from my own frustration. 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.

Why weekly stock takes matter more than you think

Weekly stock counts catch measurement error and waste so quickly you can pinpoint exactly which line is leaking money. A variance of 2–3% on spirits or draught might seem trivial until you realise that’s £150–£300 a week disappearing into cellars, pour measures, and till reconciliation gaps. By the time the brewery stocktaker arrives, you’ve already lost weeks worth of data. By then, the pattern is invisible.

Most pubs don’t know if their losses are systemic (a faulty till, a leaking cask, bad cellar temperature) or staff-related (over-pouring, forgotten wastage, spillage that no one recorded). A weekly count tells you within days. I’ve worked in pubs where the draught margin looked acceptable on the headline figure but collapsed on individual line scrutiny. One line had a 6% variance — turned out the coupler on keg three was slowly leaking into the drip tray, and nobody clocked it because we only did stock monthly.

The psychology also matters: staff know a weekly count is coming. They tighten up. Spillage gets recorded. Pint glasses don’t mysteriously become ‘samples’. The discipline itself cuts loss before you even see the numbers.

What you actually need to count

You’re not counting every bottle in the house. You’re counting three things: draught kegs, open spirit bottles, and any partial stock that will be used next week. Full, sealed bottles in the cellar don’t variance — they’re just future cost. Here’s what moves the dial.

Draught kegs (cask and keg)

Every cask and keg you have on-tap or in cold storage needs a dip. A dipstick costs £3. You insert it into the keg shive (not the bung), note the depth of beer, and cross-reference against a dip chart specific to your keg size — provided by your brewery or available free online. Record the date, keg ID, beer line, and depth in litres. That’s it.

A faulty dip is the most common error I see — people using rulers, guessing, or dipping kegs in the wrong orientation. The dip chart is not optional. Without it, you’re just writing down a depth number that means nothing.

Open spirit bottles

Any spirit bottle opened in the last week gets weighed. A set of digital scales (£15–£30) is all you need. Spirits hide losses because a free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml. You can’t see that loss on the till because the till is ringing 25ml. You see it only when you weigh the bottle and realise 2 litres have vanished into pour variance.

Record the spirit name, bottle size, weight on count day, and weight from the previous week. Work out the difference in litres (1 litre of spirit weighs roughly 950g), divide by your measure size (25ml or 35ml), and you’ll know exactly how many measures went out. Cross-check against till sales. That’s your variance.

Partial kegs and stock in rotation

If you have partial barrels, ciders in boxes with missing bottles, or spirits you’re working through slowly, record those too. But don’t count sealed, unopened stock — it ties up your time and adds no value.

The weekly count routine: step by step

You need 45 minutes, a quiet period (early morning is best), a dipstick, scales, a notebook or tablet, and your till data. Here’s the exact order.

Step 1: Dip every keg (15 minutes)

Work systematically through your cold storage and any kegs on-tap. Write down: date, keg ID (usually on the side), beer line name, dip depth. Compare against last week’s dip. A drop of more than half an inch per day on a 50-litre keg suggests a leak or a till recording error. Note it and investigate.

Step 2: Weigh every open spirit (10 minutes)

Place each bottle on the scales. Record the bottle name and weight to the nearest 10g. You’ll build a baseline after two weeks. Once you have two clean weeks, you know your par stock weight. Any week that’s significantly below means variance you need to explain.

Step 3: Record any other open stock (5 minutes)

Partials, open ciders, fortified wines — anything that’s been opened and will sell again this week. Just note what’s there. You’re looking for gross movement, not precision.

Step 4: Pull your till data and compare same day (15 minutes)

Don’t wait until Friday. Do this the same day you count. Look at till sales for each beer line and spirit for the past seven days. A 50-litre keg selling 40 litres per week but only showing 38 on the dip suggests a 2-litre variance — either the till didn’t ring those sales or they’re waste/spillage.

This is where most pubs fall down: they count stock but never cross-check against till data, so they can’t tell the difference between a till error and a cellar loss. The reconciliation is the whole point.

Step 5: Document your findings (5 minutes)

Jot down any variance >2% on any line, any kegs with unusual losses, any spirits that don’t match till sales. Not to blame anyone — just to know where to focus attention next week.

How to reconcile stock against till data

Reconciliation means comparing the amount of stock that should have sold (based on till rings) against the amount that actually left your cellar (based on dip and weight data). A gap of 1–3% is normal and expected. A gap of more than 3% on draught or 5% on spirits needs investigation.

Here’s the formula for draught:

Expected usage = till sales (in litres) + known wastage (line cleaning, spillage)
Actual usage = last week’s dip minus this week’s dip
Variance = actual usage minus expected usage

Example: Stella till shows 38 litres sold last week. You recorded 0.5 litres lost to line cleaning. Expected usage is 38.5 litres. Your dip shows the keg dropped from 42 litres to 4 litres — actual usage is 38 litres. Variance is -0.5 litres (in your favour, or possibly an error in last week’s dip). No problem.

If actual usage had been 42 litres, your variance would be +3.5 litres (3.5 litres left your cellar that didn’t ring the till). That’s a leak, bad line, stuck coupler, or a till recording gap. You investigate Monday morning.

For spirits, it’s simpler: bottles that don’t get weighed can’t be reconciled. Weigh them weekly, compare against till measure sales, and any gap over 5% is worth examining.

Common mistakes that hide losses

Dipping kegs in the wrong place or without a chart

The dip goes in the shive, not the bung. Different keg sizes have different dip charts. A 50-litre keg dipped as a 30-litre keg reads completely wrong. Get the chart from your brewery or download it from an industry body like the Cask Marque scheme.

Counting sealed stock as if it’s active

You have 12 sealed bottles of 1664 in the cellar. They don’t variance. You’ll use them next month. Don’t count them every week — you’ll just add noise to your data and waste time.

Doing stock takes at different times of the week

If you count on Monday one week and Thursday the next, you’re comparing different trading patterns and can’t spot trends. Pick a day (I use Monday morning) and stick to it. Your variance data becomes readable.

Not recording wastage

You changed a beer line and flushed 2 litres. You dropped a bottle of Grey Goose. You cleaned the draught lines on Friday. If you don’t record these, they become phantom variances in your till reconciliation. A simple notepad behind the bar marked ‘Wastage Log’ solves this.

Treating the brewery’s stocktake as your safety net

The brewery will find the variance eventually. But by then you’ve lost weeks of data, staff discipline is slack, and you’re negotiating credit against a bill you don’t fully understand. A weekly count is your early warning system.

Tools and systems that work

You don’t need expensive software to run a weekly stock take. You need discipline and a repeatable method. But tools help.

The notebook method

A hardback notebook, a pen, a dipstick, scales, and your till data. This is what I used for years. It works. The constraint is that you have to manually calculate variance and manually reconcile against till data — it’s error-prone and takes longer.

The spreadsheet

Excel or Google Sheets with formulas that auto-calculate variance against till data. Most pubs jump here and it works well until you have 8 draught lines and 20 open spirits — then the spreadsheet becomes a tangle and you stop updating it consistently. A spreadsheet isn’t the problem; guesswork and inconsistency are.

Dedicated stock software

This is where StockTap pub stock app lives. It’s built to handle the exact workflow I’ve described: weekly dips, weights, till reconciliation, and variance reporting by line. You record your count on any device, it auto-reconciles against your till data, and you get a weekly variance report showing you exactly which lines are leaking. Most pubs that move from a messy spreadsheet to a disciplined count claw back 1–2 GP points within a couple of months.

The advantage of SmartPubTools is that it forces consistency. You can’t skip the till reconciliation because it’s built into the workflow. You can’t guess dip depths because the app stores them and flags anomalies.

The hard truth: the tool doesn’t matter if you don’t have the discipline to count every week. I’ve seen pubs with expensive EPOS systems that still can’t spot a 5% variance because they count monthly and treat it as a ritual, not a diagnostic. The discipline comes first. The tool amplifies it.