Tenancy pub management tips that actually work

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most tenanted pub operators lose money without realizing where it’s going. You’ll find beer in the cellar, spirits behind the bar, takings in the till—and yet your profit margin shrinks every quarter without explanation. The issue isn’t that you’re bad at running pubs. It’s that you’re managing a tenancy like it’s a business you own outright, when actually you’re running someone else’s asset under strict terms.

A tenancy is fundamentally different from a freehold or a lease. The brewery owns the building, the beer list, and the terms. You own the operation—and the risk. That difference changes everything about how you manage the place.

I’ve run my Marston’s tenancy for 15 years, and I’ve seen licensees lose thousands because they didn’t understand what the tenancy agreement actually demanded of them, or because they didn’t track the numbers tightly enough to prove their performance to the brewery. A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year—and most of the time, no one catches it until the brewery does.

This article covers the management routines, compliance checkpoints, and measurement disciplines that actually work in a tenanted pub. Not theory. Things I do every week at my own bar.

Understand What Your Tenancy Agreement Actually Says

I’ve met licensees who’ve run their pub for three years without reading the full tenancy agreement. They know the rent amount. They know they have to stock only brewery beer. Beyond that—blank.

Your tenancy agreement is not a standard piece of paper. It’s your operating contract, your inventory responsibility, and your exit clause all in one. Before you sign anything, you need to know the following:

• Stock responsibility: Most tenancies make you responsible for beer and spirits from the moment they arrive. That means a damaged barrel, a burst cask, a broken spirit bottle—it’s your loss, not the brewery’s. You need to inspect every delivery and log damage immediately.
• Permitted suppliers: Can you buy spirits from anyone, or only from the brewery? Can you stock soft drinks or snacks from elsewhere? Most tenancies lock you into the brewery’s list, which limits your margins. Know this before you sign.
• Rent review mechanisms: When does the rent go up? Is it fixed for five years, or does it jump annually? Is there a turnover-linked review? Some breweries review rent every two years and tie it to EBITDA. If you don’t know your break-even number, you could wake up in year three unable to afford the new rent.
• Exclusivity clauses: Are you forbidden from opening a second site? Can the brewery place restrictions on your trading hours or beer range? These aren’t minor details—they’re your ceiling for growth.
• Termination and renewal: How much notice do you need to give if you want to leave? What happens if the brewery terminates the tenancy? Is there a dispute resolution clause? Some agreements allow the brewery to end a tenancy with 30 days’ notice. Others require 12 months. The difference is worth thousands.

Get a solicitor to review the agreement before you commit. This isn’t paranoia—it’s the only way to know what you’re actually signing up for.

Master Weekly Stock Control and Line Checks

You cannot run a profitable tenanted pub on monthly stock counts. The brewery knows this. They expect you to count stock weekly, and if you don’t, you’ll lose track of loss before you can act on it.

A weekly routine of dipping casks, weighing open spirit bottles, and checking beer line waste is the single most important operational discipline in a tenanted pub. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and it’s the reason my stock variance sits around 1–2% instead of 4–5% like some of my peers.

Here’s what a proper weekly routine looks like:

• Dipstick every cask and partial keg (Monday or Tuesday, same time each week). Record the depth. Compare it to last week’s reading and the till data from that product. A cask that should have sold 10 pints but only dropped 3 pints tells you there’s either a cellar temperature problem, a line cleanliness issue, or till fraud. You need to know which within a day.
• Weigh every open spirit bottle (same day). Use a set of scales accurate to 10g. Record the weight. A 700ml bottle should weigh roughly 740g (accounting for the spirit evaporation). If it’s 680g, you’re 60ml short. Over a week, that’s a 40ml per day leak or over-pour. At £15 per 75ml measure, that’s £8 a day in lost margin.
• Check line waste traps (Friday). Most pubs lose 2–3% of draught beer to line cleaning, purging, and settling. If your waste is over 4%, your lines are too warm, your cleaning routine is sloppy, or you have a leak. Fix it before the brewery notices the variance.
• Reconcile the till print (same day as the count). The till tells you what sold. The stock tells you what’s left. The gap should be within 1–2%. If it’s 4% or more, something is wrong. Run the count again the next day to confirm.

I built this routine around a dipstick and a set of scales. No app, no fancy equipment. Just discipline. When I first moved from a spreadsheet mess to this routine, my weekly variance dropped from guesswork to a number I could actually trust within a fortnight. That consistency is what the brewery is looking for.

If spreadsheets and manual counting feel chaotic, StockTap pub stock app is built specifically to make weekly counts repeatable and comparable. It’s not glamorous, but it works.

Track Wet Gross Profit, Not Just Turnover

Most tenanted pub operators obsess over total weekly takings. That number means almost nothing.

What matters is wet gross profit by line—and specifically, whether you’re making the margin the brewery expects on each product category.

Spirits hide losses in over-pouring (a free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml), draught hides loss in poor cellar temperature and bad line cleaning waste, and most stock ‘theft’ is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. You cannot see these losses in a turnover number. You need to look deeper.

Here’s what you need to track every week:

• Draught beer GP%: Calculate this as (draught revenue minus cost of goods sold) divided by draught revenue. Most pubs should be at 70–75% GP on cask and keg. If you’re at 65%, you have a problem. Is it temperature? Line cleaning? Over-pouring? You need to know which.
• Spirit GP%: You should be at 75–80% on spirits. If you’re at 70%, measure your pours. A 25ml measure poured at 32ml drops your GP by 1.5 points. Train your team, buy pouring guides, use a jigger. Don’t assume they know.
• Bottled beer and soft drinks GP%: These often carry higher margin than draught, but only if you’re not over-stocking slow movers that go out of date.

Run this analysis from your till data every Monday morning. You’ll spot trends in days, not weeks. If a spirit line suddenly drops from 78% to 72%, investigate it the same day. That’s a £200 swing in a week.

Your brewery may not ask to see these numbers, but they will notice when your turnover is high but your rent payments get slower. That’s the real signal that something’s wrong.

Build a Cash Flow Routine That Works Around Brewery Orders

A tenanted pub’s cash flow is locked to the brewery’s delivery and payment cycle. Most breweries expect payment within 7–14 days of delivery. If you miss it, they’ll cut your credit, which means COD (cash on delivery) for the next order, which starves your working capital.

The most effective way to manage cash flow in a tenanted pub is to ring-fence a weekly brewery payment fund separate from your operating account. As soon as revenue hits the till, you move 35–40% of it into a holding account earmarked for next week’s brewery bill. The rest is yours to run the pub and pay wages.

Why 35–40%? Because:

• Your stock cost of goods (COGS) is typically 30–35% of wet sales turnover.
• The brewery delivery cycle is weekly or fortnightly, not daily.
• You need a three-to-four-day buffer to avoid dipping into rent or wages to pay suppliers.

I do this by moving money into a separate instant-access savings account every Tuesday morning. It takes five minutes. At the end of the week, I pay the brewery invoice from that account. If my COGS runs higher than expected, I know before I’ve promised payment I can’t afford.

This matters because the brewery watches payment patterns. Slow or missed payments trigger a conversation with the area manager, which is the start of a tenancy review. Tenancy reviews cost money and time, and you’re always defending yourself against the assumption that you’ve mismanaged the business.

Know your break-even point (fixed costs ÷ gross margin) and your cash break-even point (the weekly revenue you need to cover wages, rent, utilities, and brewery pay). If your actual weekly turnover is below that, you’re borrowing to survive. Most tenancies include debt covenants—if your debt-to-equity ratio exceeds a certain level, the brewery can demand repayment or restructuring. It’s rare, but it happens.

Stay Compliant: The Quiet Costs of Missing Brewery Requirements

Your tenancy agreement probably includes compliance requirements you haven’t thought about in years. These are easy to overlook, and expensive to fix when they catch you out.

The main ones:

• Beer tie compliance: You must stock a minimum percentage of the brewery’s own brands. If you’re running only 40% brewery beer and the agreement says 60%, you’re in breach. The brewery might overlook it once, but not twice.
• Cask quality and condition: Every cask that arrives is your responsibility. If you’re storing them in a 20°C cellar, they’re deteriorating. If you’re serving warm beer, the brewery will hear about it from customers. Temperature control isn’t optional—it’s a compliance issue.
• Health and safety records: Food hygiene, fire safety, staff training, incident logs. The brewery can ask to see any of these. If you don’t have records, it looks worse than if you have records showing minor issues you’ve fixed.
• Marketing fund contributions: Most brewery tenancies require you to pay into a local or national marketing fund. This is usually 2–3% of turnover. If you’re late or non-compliant, it triggers a formal notice.
• Annual accounts or profit certification: Some agreements require you to submit audited accounts or a certified profit statement. If you’re late, the brewery can use it as grounds for a rent review outside the normal cycle.

Build a compliance calendar. January: health and safety audit. March: stock tie audit. June: accounts prep. September: marketing fund reconciliation. October: cask and equipment audit. This takes two hours a month and saves you from surprises.

Measure What Matters: Real Numbers Beat Guesswork

The difference between a successful tenancy and a struggling one isn’t luck or location. It’s the difference between people who know their numbers and people who don’t.

You need a dashboard that tracks these metrics every week:

• Wet sales turnover (draught, spirits, bottled, soft drinks—split, not lumped)
• Wet COGS and wet GP%
• Stock variance (actual stock count vs. till-calculated stock)
• Cash balance (operating account + brewery fund)
• Debt position (any money owing to the brewery for short pays)

You don’t need an accountant or software to do this. A simple spreadsheet updated every Monday morning will show you trends that a monthly P&L won’t. I’ve been using a spreadsheet for my own pub for years. The discipline of updating it every week is more valuable than the data itself, because it forces you to look at what’s actually happening instead of guessing.

If a spreadsheet feels like a drag, SmartPubTools gives you real-time visibility. The point isn’t the tool. The point is that you’re looking at the numbers weekly, not quarterly.

The brewery is looking at your numbers too. When they review your tenancy, they’ll see your P&L, your payment history, and your stock variance. If all three are solid, the conversation will be about growth. If one of them is weak, the conversation will be about risk. You want to be the first type of conversation.