Free pub stocktaking software: what free actually gets you

Free pub stocktaking software comes in four flavours. A spreadsheet, which is properly free. A free tier of a paid app, which is a shop window. A free trial wearing a free badge. And a "free demo", which is a sales call with a calendar link. Only the first one costs nothing forever, and it stops being good enough sooner than most licensees think.

I run a pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear, and I did my stock on a free spreadsheet for years. So this isn't a software company sneering at free. It's what free actually got me, where it fell over, and when I'd still tell a mate to use it.

The spreadsheet: the only truly free option

A stock spreadsheet costs nothing and it does work. One row per product, a cost price, a sell price, a count column, and a sum at the bottom. Do that opening and closing, add your deliveries, subtract your sales, and you've got a variance figure. That's a real stocktake. Nobody should pay a penny before they've outgrown that.

Here's where mine fell over. It couldn't weigh a bottle, so every spirit was my eye guessing tenths, and the eye is always kind to itself. It couldn't calibrate a cask, so draught was fiction. And one February a formula got dragged one row out and quietly poisoned every figure after it for six weeks. I wasn't managing stock, I was managing a spreadsheet that lied politely.

Past about a hundred lines, that stops being a saving. I've written more on where the tools take over in the main stocktaking software guide.

Free tiers: what $0 a month actually buys

A few paid apps run a genuinely free tier. The clearest example is Backbar, whose Basic plan is $0 a month with paid plans from $79 to $149. Fair play to them for publishing that. But it's an American product, it thinks in ounces rather than 25ml measures, and the free tier caps the things you'd actually want, which is the whole point of a free tier. It exists to show you the paid one.

That's the pattern with every free tier I've looked at. The cap always lands on the exact thing that made you download it. The moment the tool is useful, it isn't free.

Free trials wearing a free badge

Most of what Google serves you for "free pub stocktaking software" is a trial. Growyze gives you 30 days without a card, then it's £79 to £139 per venue per month. BevSpot's trial is capped by usage rather than time, which means it ends precisely when you start using it properly. I find that one a bit cheeky.

I'm not going to pretend StockTap is different in kind. It isn't free either. You get 14 days without putting a card in, and after that it's £19 a month at the founding rate for the first fifty customers, £39 standard. The difference I'll claim is only that I've just told you the price in the second paragraph it came up, which brings me to the next lot.

The "free demo" is not a price

Then there's the tier of tools where everything sits behind "book a free demo". StockTake Online is the clearest example, there's no public price anywhere, you book the call to find out. A demo isn't a price. If a company needs your phone number before it'll tell you what the product costs, budget for the answer being more than mine.

What no free option will do

Whatever flavour of free you pick, the same jobs stay undone.

None of them weigh spirits. Your eye calls a bottle three tenths when it's a quarter, and over forty optics that kindness compounds. Say a 70cl bottle stands you £14 at cost. One tenth is £1.40. Forty bottles each flattered by a tenth is £56 of stock you think you have and don't, every single count. That's my arithmetic, but check it against your own bar.

None of them handle draught honestly. British Beer and Pub Association guidance allows a pint served with a head to be 95% liquid, so up to 5% of every pour is legal froth that never rings through the till. A naive free tool books that as missing stock and has you hunting a problem that doesn't exist. Cask and keg need proper calibration, which I've covered in the calibration guide.

And none of them catch a miscoded till button, which is one of the quietest ways a wet-led site leaks money. One of my own audits came back £756 down, and the worst part wasn't the number, it was how little the free tools could tell me about where it came from.

When free is genuinely the right call

Small site, forty lines or fewer, mostly packaged product, counting fortnightly? Keep the spreadsheet. Honestly. The money you'd spend on software is better spent on stock, and the discipline of counting matters far more than the tool. Check the formulas monthly against a manual total and you'll be fine.

The line I'd draw: once you're wet-led with a full back bar of spirits, or past a hundred lines, or you've had one variance you couldn't explain, the not-knowing costs more per month than the cheapest paid tool does. At that point free is the expensive option.

What I'd do this week

Don't buy anything. Take your current spreadsheet, or start one, and count your top thirty lines by value. Then run any paid trial you like alongside it for one count, mine or anyone else's, and compare what each tells you about the same bar on the same night. If the free version answers every question you have, keep it and cancel. If it can't tell you why the vodka's short, now you know what you're actually paying for.