Stocktake Online Review 2026

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most pub stocktakes happen once a year, usually with a hangover and a spreadsheet that hasn’t been touched since Christmas. You’re missing money every single week — and you won’t know it until it’s too late. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year, and that’s the amount you’re writing off without even knowing where it went. The problem isn’t that you’re bad at counting — it’s that you’re counting too infrequently and measuring the wrong things. This article cuts through the myths about stocktaking and shows you exactly what matters, what doesn’t, and why your brewery stocktaker isn’t doing the job you think they are. You’ll learn how to spot losses before they become losses, why wet GP by line is the only number that actually tells you anything, and the simple routine I built that turned my own scattered spreadsheets into a number I could trust.

Annual Stocktakes vs. Weekly Checks: Which Wins?

Annual stocktakes are almost useless for finding where money is actually leaking out. You get one number. It tells you nothing about when the loss happened, which line caused it, or whether it’s a measurement error or a real problem. By the time the number exists, you’ve already written off three to six months of margin and can’t do anything about it.

Weekly checks are a completely different animal. 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. Once I could see the variance week-to-week, I could spot patterns: which cask was running hot, which spirit measure was consistently off, where the line was wasting beer.

Most pubs that move from a messy spreadsheet to a disciplined weekly count claw back 1–2 GP points within a couple of months. That’s real money. That’s payroll. That’s the difference between a break-even month and a profitable one.

The brewery stocktaker will come in once a quarter or once a year. They’re checking that you haven’t stolen from the pubco. They’re not checking that your cellar temperature is right, or that your free-pour is actually 25ml, or that you’ve written off the right amount of line waste. You have to do that yourself.

What Actually Matters in a Stocktake

Forget the headline number. That’s not how you manage a pub. The number that actually matters is wet GP by line — not a single stock figure. Spirits hide losses in over-pouring. Draught hides it in poor cellar temperature and bad line cleaning waste. Bottled beer hides it in breakages and discount mistakes. Each line has its own margin risk, and they need separate attention.

Here’s what you need to track:

• Spirits and optics: Weigh every open bottle. A free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml without anyone trying to steal. That’s the leak.
• Draught (cask and keg): Dip every cask and partial keg the same time every week. Temperature drift, line cleaning, and walkthroughs kill margin fast here.
• Bottled beer and wine: Count against till records from the same day. Breakages, missing invoices, and staff drinks add up quietly.
• Till reconciliation: Do it the same day as the count. Don’t wait a week. The number only means something if you can cross-check it against what the till says sold.

Most pub operators are looking at a single monthly stock number and trying to work backwards. You need to flip that. Start with the till, then measure what’s left, and the variance tells you where to look.

Where Stock Actually Goes (And Why Measurement Matters)

Most stock “theft” is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. This is the insight that changed how I think about stocktakes. In fifteen years, I’ve never had a serious till-out problem. What I have had is:

• A spirit bottle that’s consistently light because the measure cup is cracked and doesn’t sit flush in the optic.
• A cask that read 15 gallons when it was actually 12 because the previous person didn’t dip it properly.
• Three kegs marked “open” on a shelf that nobody remembered to pour out and write off as waste.
• A line that hadn’t been cleaned in six weeks, losing 2–3 pints per cask in slow movement and blockages.
• Breakages that got written into the loss column but never actually reconciled against the till.

None of that is theft. All of it is measurable. All of it shows up in weekly variance if you count the same way every time.

Temperature matters more than you think. Draught loses condition fast in a warm cellar — not linearly, but it does. A cask at 16°C will hold for ten days. At 18°C it’ll start to sour by day eight. You’re writing off margin that you could have sold, and the only way to catch it is to dip it, check the temperature, and make the call on the day. Not two weeks later when you’re doing the month-end count.

How to Run a Proper Count Without Losing Your Mind

You don’t need software. You don’t need consultants. You need a routine that you’ll actually stick to every week.

Here’s the process I use:

1. Pick a day and time. Mine is Tuesday morning, before service prep. Same day, same time, every week. This matters more than you’d think — consistency is what makes the numbers reliable.
2. Count spirits and measure optics. Weigh every open bottle on the same scales, same location. Write it down immediately. Don’t round. 240g is not the same as 250g.
3. Dip every cask and keg. Mark down the depth, temperature, and whether it’s still sellable. If it’s off, write it off that day — don’t wait.
4. Count stock on shelf. Bottles, cans, anything else not in the cellar. Quick, visual, but it needs doing.
5. Pull till records for the same day last week. What sold last Tuesday? Compare to what you count this Tuesday. The gap is your variance for the week.
6. Write variance by line into a simple spreadsheet or record it in StockTap pub stock app. See trends. Spirits creeping up? Line waste increasing? Draught margin dropping? Fix it that week, not the month after.

This takes 20 minutes if you’re organised, 45 if you’re not. It’s not the time that kills most pubs — it’s the inconsistency. You skip one week, the data gets messy, you stop trusting the numbers, and you go back to the annual spreadsheet.

Should You Use an App or Stick with a Spreadsheet?

This is where people get confused. A spreadsheet works fine if you’re disciplined. What it doesn’t do is remind you, or prevent you from entering data in a different format, or let you see trends without manually building a chart.

An app like SmartPubTools is built for this exact workflow. It’s designed to handle the way a pub actually runs — casks with partial kegs, shared spirit bottles, line waste that happens mid-week. More importantly, it forces consistency. You dip the same cask the same way every week because the app is designed around that routine.

The real question isn’t whether you “need” an app. The question is: will a spreadsheet genuinely survive six months of real pub life without becoming a mess? If you’re someone who colour-codes things and updates on time, maybe. If you’re like most licensees — human, busy, occasionally hungover — an app removes the friction.

A spreadsheet is also not a good safety place to keep records. Is it backed up? Is it password protected? If you’re sold or audited, can you pull three months of data in two minutes? An app designed for pubs handles that automatically.

The Real Time Cost (And Why It’s Worth It)

The objection I hear most is: “I don’t have time to stocktake every week.” The answer is not that you have to find time — it’s that you can’t afford not to.

A 20-minute count every Tuesday costs you 1.7 hours a week, or about 80 hours a year. In that time, you’ll catch losses that otherwise cost you £3,000–£5,000. That’s a return of roughly £40–£60 per hour of count time. Your bar manager probably earns £12–£15 per hour. The math is obvious.

But there’s a second piece: once you have reliable data, you stop having arguments about stock. You know what happened. You can show it to your manager, your pubco, or your accountant. You’re not guessing. That saves time in meetings and conversations that would otherwise happen anyway.

The first month will feel like a chore. By month two, it becomes routine. By month three, you’ll notice you’re actually making better decisions about what to push, what margins are real, and where the problem areas are.