Best pub stocktaking software 2026: an honest shortlist

There is no single best pub stocktaking software, and anyone who ranks one tool at the top for everyone is selling you something. The right pick depends on whether you run one site or forty, whether you count by weight or by eye, and how much you'll actually keep doing week after week. Here's the honest shortlist for 2026, what each one is genuinely good at, and where each falls down. I build one of these, so read me with that in mind. I've still put the others in fairly.

I run a wet-led pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear. Seventeen staff. Five independent audits in eight months. I've used the clipboard, the man who charges to hold the clipboard, and the software. So this list is sorted by who it's for, not by who pays me, because nobody does.

The quick version

• Single site, wet-led, wants it affordable and accurate: StockTap.
• Multi-site group with a finance team and a budget to match: MarginEdge or Access Procure Wizard.
• Food-led restaurant that wants recipe costing bolted on: Nory or MarginEdge.
• Wants a free spreadsheet and has under fifty lines: a spreadsheet, honestly, until it hurts.

Now the detail, because those one-liners hide a lot.

StockTap

Mine. Built by a licensee who got sick of guessing tenths and getting charged back. It counts spirits by weight so the number is exact, not a squint. It handles draught properly with keg and cask calibration, and it does not treat the legal 5% head on a pint as theft, which most cheap tools do. Offline-first, because half a cellar has no signal. Founding price is £19 a month for the first fifty pubs, £39 after, and you can cancel any time.

Where it stops: it's young. It doesn't have a decade of integrations, and if you want deep purchase-order automation across forty sites it isn't built for that yet. It's built for the operator who wants to know what they're losing this week without a training course.

MarginEdge

Strong for food-led operations that want invoices processed and recipe costs tracked automatically. It plugs into a lot of tills and accounting packages. If your problem is a big kitchen and a mountain of supplier invoices, it earns its keep.

The catch is the price and the fit. It's priced per location in dollars and it's built around US-style operations. For a wet-led British pub counting draught, you're paying for a food engine you won't fully use. Check the real monthly cost in pounds before you commit.

Access Procure Wizard

Enterprise procurement and stock for hospitality groups. Powerful if you're a managed estate with central buying. Proper reporting, proper controls.

It's also a "book a demo" product with contracts that can run to 36 months. For a single pub or a small group it's a sledgehammer, and the commitment is real. Don't sign three years to solve a one-site problem.

BevSpot and BarBrain

Both aimed at bar inventory. BevSpot is polished and American, again priced in dollars and built for US bars, so the same draught and pricing caveats apply. BarBrain is cheaper and lighter. Both are fine at counting. Neither is built around weighing as the accurate default, and that's the bit that catches spirit shrinkage a wet-led pub bleeds on.

Growyze and Nory

Growyze does stock and ordering for hospitality with a clean app. Nory leans into AI forecasting and labour for bigger, food-led groups. Both are capable. Both are pitched above the lone landlord who just wants an honest weekly variance without a subscription that stings.

How to actually choose

Ignore the feature grids. Book nothing until you've checked these.

• Can you finish a count and see a value the same night, on a phone, with no laptop and no onboarding call? If not, you'll stop using it by week three.
• Does it weigh spirits, or make you guess tenths? Guessing is where the money hides.
• Does it understand draught froth and line cleaning, or does it scream theft at a normal cellar?
• What's the contract and the currency? Monthly and in pounds beats a dollar-priced annual lock-in for a UK pub.
• Can you export your own data whenever you want?

Pick one. Load your top thirty lines by value. Weigh the spirits, count the rest. Do it twice, a week apart. The tool that makes that easy is the best one for you, whatever a ranking says.