Bar inventory management: what actually works in a UK bar

Bar inventory management comes down to four jobs: know what stock you hold, know what it cost, know what you sold, and chase the gap between them in pounds. Weekly, not quarterly. Weigh the spirits instead of guessing tenths, cost every pour ex VAT, and treat the variance number as the whole point. Everything else the software brochures list is admin.

I'm a licensee in Washington, Tyne and Wear, running a wet-led site: draught, a long back bar of spirits, and fridges. I built StockTap because the counting tools I tried either guessed, cost silly money, or were built for American bars measuring in ounces. So yes, I sell one of the tools in this guide. I'll be straight about where each one fits, including where mine doesn't.

What bar inventory management actually means

Strip the jargon and it's a loop you run every week. Count what's physically there. Add what was delivered. Subtract what the till says you sold. Whatever's left over or missing is your variance, and variance is money: stock you paid for that never became a sale. The £200m a year that beer wastage alone costs UK hospitality is variance nobody chased.

A bar that runs this loop weekly finds a problem inside seven days of it starting. A bar that counts quarterly finds out after ninety, by which point the habit that caused it has a season ticket.

Bars leak differently to pubs

Most stock advice online is written for pubs or for American cocktail bars, and a UK bar sits between the two. The spirits share of sales is higher than a pub's, which changes where the money leaks.

Free pour is the big one. A UK single is 25ml. Pour it heavy at 35ml, which is nothing with a speed pourer in your hand and a queue three deep, and you've given away 40% extra on that serve. The till still says one single was sold. No theft, no waste bin, nothing to see. Just a bottle that empties faster than the till says it should. Multiply by a busy Saturday and a full speed rail and that's your variance right there.

Cocktails leak in their own way: batching that nobody wrote down, syrups and juices that never get counted, the splash of this and dash of that which no spec sheet covers. And comps. Every bar comps drinks. The leak isn't the comping, it's the not logging, because an unlogged comp is indistinguishable from theft in your numbers, and that poisons the one report you need to trust.

To be clear on where I stand: none of this is about calling your staff thieves. Nearly all of it is over-pour, unlogged waste and till mistakes, done by good people on busy shifts. The numbers are how you fix the process, not how you build a case.

Count spirits by weight, not by eye

The industry default is eyeballing bottles in tenths. Your eye is a generous instrument. A bottle you'd call half full is often four tenths, and across sixty spirit lines that flattery compounds into a stock figure that's fiction. Weighing fixes it: put the bottle on a kitchen scale, and software that knows the full and empty weights converts grams to millilitres exactly. It's the method StockTap is built around, it needs no hardware beyond a £15 scale, and it turns the slowest, most error-prone part of a bar count into the most accurate.

You don't weigh everything. Weigh the back bar and anything expensive. Count packaged fridge stock by the case and loose singles. A weekly count of your top thirty lines by value beats a monthly count of all four hundred, because the top thirty is where the money is.

The tools, with real prices

Real prices as published in 2026, converted to nothing, dressed up as nothing.

Bar inventory software with published pricing, August 2026. Quote-only vendors excluded on principle: if the price needs a sales call, the price is negotiable and so is your patience.

Tool	Published price	Trial	Built for
StockTap	£19/month founding rate (first 50), £39/month standard	Free trial, no card	UK pubs and bars, weight-based counts, ml and UK measures
Backbar	Free basic tier, then $79–149/month	Free tier	US bars, ounce-based
Bar Patrol	$49–69/month	No free trial	US bars, ounce-based
WISK	$249–399/month plus $750 setup	Paid onboarding	Larger venues and groups
MarketMan	$199–249/month	Demo-led	Restaurants and groups, procurement-heavy

The pattern to notice: the American tools think in ounces and dollars, and their pricing assumes American bar revenues. If your till rings in pounds and your measures are 25ml and 50ml, check the tool actually speaks that language before you're three weeks into setup. Ex VAT costing matters too. UK VAT is 20%, and a GP% calculated on till prices with the VAT still in flatters every line by a fifth. I've written a fuller comparison of the pub-side tools in my pub stocktaking software comparison.

Par levels and ordering, the unglamorous half

Inventory management isn't only about what leaks. It's also about the £800 of slow-moving liqueurs a rep talked someone into that will still be on the shelf at Christmas. Set a par level per line based on what a normal week actually sells, order to par, and review the pars when the season turns. Dead stock is money sleeping on a shelf, and it's the easiest cash win in the building: run the report, find what hasn't moved in ninety days, and put it on a promo before it goes out of date.

Where software won't save you

Honest limits. No inventory system fixes a free-pour culture on its own: that takes jiggers or measured pourers and a manager willing to be boring about it. It won't stop a leak it can't see, so if the batching and comps never get logged, the report is fiction with a dashboard. And the first count is always the worst one, because building the product library with full and empty bottle weights takes a real afternoon. Anyone who tells you setup is ten minutes has never done a setup.

What it does do is turn "I think we're alright" into a number, every week, in pounds. After that the fixes are usually obvious and usually free.

Start this week

Pick your top thirty lines by value. Weigh the spirits among them, case-count the rest, write down the total. Log every comp and every smashed bottle for seven days. Count again next week and look at the gap between what the till says left the building and what actually did. That one number will tell you more about your bar than any article, including this one.