Hotel bar stocktaking software: what to use when the bar isn't the only outlet

Counting a hotel bar is the same sum as counting a pub. Opening stock, plus deliveries, minus sales, equals what should be on the shelf. What's different is movement. Hotel stock walks: cellar to lobby bar, bar to kitchen, cellar to a function bar for a wedding and half of it back again, and a case of miniatures up to the third floor. Software that can't count each outlet as its own location will tell you the building is fine while one bar inside it bleeds. Here's what the job actually involves, who handles what, and what it costs, from £19 a month to quote-only suites.

A word on where I'm writing this from. I run a pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear, not a hotel. But I've been through five independent liquor audits in eight months, and the arithmetic that catches a leak is the same arithmetic in any building with a bar in it. What changes in a hotel is the number of doors the stock goes through before anyone counts it. So that's how this guide is organised: the doors.

One building, one count: the mistake that hides everything

The lazy way to stocktake a hotel is to treat the whole building as one stock room. Add up everything everywhere, compare it to total sales, get one variance. That number can look respectable while telling you nothing. A tight lobby bar running at 0.3% down and a function bar running at 4% down average out to a figure nobody loses sleep over.

Every outlet needs its own count and its own variance. Lobby bar. Restaurant bar. Function stock. Cellar as a holding location. Minibars as one more. The moment you split them, the building stops being a mystery and becomes four or five small, solvable problems. Most of them turn out to be paperwork, not pouring. Which is the same thing I found in my own pub when the variance turned out to be measuring and mapping rather than anything sinister.

The four doors hotel stock walks through

1. Outlet to outlet

The restaurant borrows two bottles of Prosecco from the lobby bar on a busy Saturday. Nobody writes it down, because everyone's busy, which is why it happened in the first place. At month-end the lobby bar is two bottles down and the restaurant is two bottles up, and if you only look at one variance report you'll go hunting for a leak that doesn't exist. The fix is boring: a transfer log, priced at cost, even if it's a notebook on a string. Software helps by making the move a ten-second job on a phone instead of a form, but the discipline is the fix, not the app.

2. Bar to kitchen

Cooking wine, a splash of brandy for the sauce, half a bottle of stout for the pie, and a glass of house white that never comes back. Kitchens consume bar stock in most hotels every week, and it almost never goes through a till. Untracked, it lands in the bar's variance looking exactly like theft. Price it up and it's rarely frightening, a few pounds a week, but you have to see it separately to know that. One line in the transfer log per bottle. That's the whole system.

3. The function bar

Functions are where hotel wet stock goes to die quietly. Stock goes out to a mobile bar, the event runs, part-used bottles come back, and by the time the monthly count happens nobody remembers which wedding drank what. Count the function bar out and back the same day, every event, and treat each event as its own mini stocktake. This is also the one place where weighing part-bottles beats every other counting method, because a function returns you fifteen part-used bottles at once and eyeballing tenths on fifteen bottles is guessing. On scales it's five minutes and it's accurate to the pour.

4. Minibars

I'll be straight about this one: stocktaking software is not the answer to minibars, mine included. Minibar control is a housekeeping process. A fixed par list per room, a restock sheet that says what went into which room, and a charge posted for what's missing. The stock system's job is just to treat "minibars" as one location, so the miniatures that leave the cellar have somewhere to be counted against. If minibars are your biggest leak, fix the restock paperwork before you spend a penny on software.

Room-posted sales: the catch nobody mentions

In a pub, sales data lives in one place, the till. In a hotel it often lives in two: the bar till, and the property management system where residents charge drinks to their room. If your stock system only sees the till export, every room-charged gin looks like a missing gin.

So before you buy anything, ask one question of your own systems: can I pull one product-level sales report that covers both till sales and room-posted sales for a date range? If the answer is yes, any stock system that accepts a sales file can do this job. If the answer is no, fix that first, because no stocktaking software at any price can compute a variance against sales it can't see. The same logic applies to till links generally, and I've written up what EPOS integration actually does and doesn't do.

Who does what, at what price

Published prices, checked against the vendors' own pages August and September 2026. Where a vendor is quote-only, that's what it says.

UK-facing stock systems a hotel bar might shortlist. Prices are per month and come from each vendor's published pages; always confirm before you sign.

System	Published price	Locations / outlets	Worth knowing
Access (hospitality suite)	Quote only	One site to estate-wide	Suite-based, aimed at groups; stock is one module among many, no published pricing
WISK	$249 to $399 + $750 setup	Multi-outlet	North-America-first, priced in dollars, recipe costing for food
Jelly	£129 per location	Per location	Invoice scanning and live GP, links Square, Epos Now, Lightspeed and Toast
Growyze	£79 to £139 per venue	Per venue	Links several UK tills, 30-day trial with no card
MarginEdge	$350 per location	Per location	Invoice-first, food-led, US pricing
StockTap	£19 (Pro), £39 (Premium)	Locations within a venue; multi-venue on Premium	Weight-based counting on your phone, sales in by CSV, wet-stock-first

Notice the shape of that table. The hotel-suite end gives you PMS conversations and procurement modules and won't print a price. The pub-first end gives you counting, locations and variance for a fraction of the money. The question is which half of the job you're actually missing.

Where StockTap fits, and where it doesn't

StockTap is mine, so here's the straight version. It counts by weighing bottles on your phone, which is exactly what a stack of function-bar part-bottles needs. It does locations, a By Location report, weekly spot checks against till figures, and it takes sales in as a CSV from whatever the till exports. Premium adds consolidated reporting across venues. It's £19 a month, or £39 for Premium, with a 14-day free trial and no card.

What it doesn't do: it has no PMS integration, so room-posted sales need to be in the sales file you upload. It doesn't do food recipes, so if your hotel needs a burger to deplete a bun and 30g of cheese, you want one of the bigger systems at their bigger prices. And minibars, as above, are a housekeeping process it can hold a location for, not a product feature. If your operation is a food-led hotel restaurant with a small bar on the side, I'd point you at the food-first tools before my own. If the wet side is where the money and the mystery is, that's the job StockTap was built for.

The one-month test

Before buying anything, run this. Pick your two busiest outlets. Count them separately, as two locations, at the start of the month. Log every transfer between them on paper. Get a sales figure for each outlet, count again at month-end, and work out two variances instead of one.

One month of that tells you which door your stock is walking out of, and it tells you whether your systems can even produce per-outlet sales. It costs you two evenings. Whatever software you buy after that, you'll be buying it for the outlet that needs it, on evidence, instead of buying a suite because the building felt leaky. The rest of the buying questions, contracts, exports and the ex-VAT trap, are in the buyer's checklist.

Common questions

Is stocktaking a hotel bar different from stocktaking a pub?

The counting is identical. Opening stock plus deliveries minus sales equals what should be there, and a 70cl bottle weighs the same in a lobby bar as it does in a pub. What changes is movement: hotel stock passes between the cellar, several bars, the kitchen, functions and minibars, so a single whole-building count hides which outlet is leaking. Count each outlet as its own location.

Can I use pub stocktaking software in a hotel bar?

For wet stock, usually yes, as long as it supports separate locations with a variance per location. Where pub-first tools run out of road is food and recipe depletion, property management system links for room-posted sales, and minibar billing. If your operation is food-heavy or you need the stock system talking to the PMS, expect to pay hotel-suite prices.

How should a hotel handle minibar stock?

Treat minibars as one location with a fixed par list per room, restocked and charged by housekeeping on a paper or PMS checklist. Most stock software, including mine, treats minibars as another location at best. The control that works is the par list and a room-by-room restock record, not an app on the counting night.

How do I stop kitchen and bar transfers wrecking my variance?

Record them, even scrappily. A bottle of house red that goes to the kitchen for cooking shows up as a missing bottle in the bar's variance unless it is written down and moved between locations. A one-line transfer book at the cellar door, priced up at cost each week, is enough. If nobody records transfers, your bar variance is fiction.

How often should a hotel bar do a stocktake?

Same cadence as a busy pub: a full count monthly, and a weekly spot check on the twenty highest-value lines in each outlet. Function bars are the exception. Count those out and back the same day for every event, because a part-used bottle that waits until month-end has no story attached to it by then.