Drinks on the house: the £1.56 pint that shows up as £5.34 missing

A pint on the house costs you about £1.56. The same pint, comped but never recorded anywhere, shows up on your next stocktake as £5.34 of missing stock. That's the whole problem with comps in one sum: the generosity is cheap, the silence is dear. This guide is the arithmetic, the till button, the log that takes ten seconds, and what an auditor makes of drinks on the house.

First, to be clear about what this guide is not. It is not an argument against comping. A pint for the regular who helped you bring the furniture in, a replacement for the meal that took fifty minutes, a drink for the couple whose table got double booked. That's not leakage, that's running a pub. The problem is never the free drink. It's the free drink nobody wrote down.

What an unrecorded comp does to the count

Follow the stock. A pint leaves the cellar. The till records nothing. On count day the maths is simple and brutal: stock that should be there isn't, and there's no sale to explain it. Your variance report values that gap at what the pint should have sold for, not what it cost, because as far as the count is concerned it's a lost sale. So the comp you thought of as a £1.56 gesture is sitting in your variance at £5.34.

The figures: the average UK pint was £5.34 in the Morning Advertiser's May 2026 survey. Strip the VAT and that's £4.45. At a 65% wet GP the liquid cost you about £1.56. Now run one comp a night through a year, recorded and unrecorded.

One comped pint a night, at the £5.34 average. Author's arithmetic on the MA survey price and a 65% GP; your prices will move the numbers, the shape stays the same.

	Per week	Per year	Where it shows up
Recorded comp (true cost)	£10.92	£568	A comps line you chose, priced at cost
Unrecorded comp (valued at retail)	£37.38	£1,944	Unexplained variance on your stocktake

Same kindness, three and a half times the apparent damage, and the worse version is the one you can't defend. There's a second cost too. If you investigate variance above 1% of wet sales, which is a sensible working threshold, then on a £6,000 wet week your alarm line is £60. Eleven quiet comps a week is £59 of it. Half your tolerance for finding real problems, eaten by generosity nobody logged, and the real problems get to hide behind it. Vianet's dispense data found 2% of drinks poured in UK pubs never reach the till; some of that is exactly this.

Why the good ones still hurt

Most unrecorded comps are given for good reasons by good people. The bartender who smooths over a forty-minute food wait with a free half is doing customer service, and at 9pm on a Friday she is not going to stop and fill in a form. If your team comps without recording, you don't have a staff problem. You have a missing button. Fix the button.

Recording that actually gets used

The test for any comp system is whether it survives 11pm on a Saturday. If recording the drink takes longer than pouring it, it won't happen, and you're back to silent variance. Two mechanisms pass that test, and they work best together.

A zero-priced comp button on the till. Same idea as the zero-priced claimed button for prepaid pints: the product goes through the till at £0, so the stock movement is matched by a till event even though no money moved. Your variance report stops seeing a ghost, and your comp report tells you what was given away, when, and on which key. One press, no form. If your till can do reasons (staff drink, service recovery, promo), better still, but don't let perfect kill quick.

A comps line in the wastage log. For pubs without a spare till button, the wastage log does the same job on paper or in an app: date, what, why, initials. Ten seconds. On count day the log turns unexplained variance into an explained allowance, which is the entire point.

Then one sentence of policy, written down where the rota lives: who can comp, roughly what for, and that every comp gets the button or the book. Not a lecture, a sentence. The pubs where comping goes wrong are almost never the generous ones, they're the ones where nobody ever said how it works.

What the auditor sees

If you're audited, the difference between recorded and unrecorded comps is the difference between a line item and a question mark. A stock auditor values your variance at retail and asks you to explain it; a comps report or a signed log moves those pints from the unexplained pile to the allowances pile before the meeting even starts. I've had five audits in eight months, and what the auditor is actually doing is looking for movements without paperwork. Comps are the easiest paperwork you'll ever create, and the most annoying to be missing, because the drink was your choice all along.

Set a line, not a lecture

How much comping is normal? There's no published UK benchmark, and I'm not going to invent one. What works is picking your own line as a weekly cash figure you're comfortable giving away, at cost, and then reading the comp report weekly the same way you'd read voids and refunds: by reason and by time of day, never by name. If the number creeps, tighten who can press the button. If it's steady and the goodwill is real, that's marketing money working, and cheaper than most.

The tax bit, briefly

A drink given away for nothing is a business gift for VAT. HMRC's rule (VAT Notice 700/7, section 2.3) is that you don't account for output VAT on gifts to the same person as long as the total cost of everything you've given them stays under £50, excluding VAT, in any 12 months. One regular would need a serious birthday to breach that on pints costing £1.56 each. Staff drinks are a different animal, treated under the staff entertainment rules rather than the gift rules. If comping is a big part of how you trade, put the question to your accountant; this is context, not advice.

Common questions

Are free drinks legal under my licence?

A drink on the house at your discretion is fine. What the mandatory licensing conditions ban is irresponsible promotions, which includes offering unlimited or unspecified quantities of alcohol free or for a fixed fee. "This one's on me" is not that. "Free drinks all night for anyone in fancy dress" is heading that way. The Home Office guidance on the mandatory conditions is the reference if you're planning anything promotional.

Do comps explain my whole variance?

Only the recorded ones, and usually not all of it even then. Comps sit alongside pouring, line cleaning, unlogged wastage and counting error as one cause among several. If the gap is bigger than your comps and wastage records combined, work through what an acceptable variance looks like and go from there.

Should staff pay for comps that weren't logged?

No. Fix the recording first, because until you have, you can't tell a comp from a short delivery from a heavy pour, and docking wages over a number you can't trust is a fast way to lose good people. There are legal limits on deductions anyway. If unexplained loss persists after recording is fixed, that's a different investigation, and there's a guide for it.

Is a staff drink a comp?

Treat it as its own category with its own rule, because it behaves differently: it's regular and predictable, and HMRC views it under different rules too. A written staff drinks policy (what, when, logged how) plus the same zero-priced button does the job. What kills pubs is not the shift pint, it's the shift pint that was never anyone's decision.