How long does a pub stocktake take?

A full wet stocktake on a typical single-site pub, somewhere between 150 and 250 lines, takes two to four hours with a clipboard and a calculator. With an app doing the maths as you count, it's closer to an hour and a half. Your first ever count takes double or triple that, because you're building your product list as you go. A weekly spot check on your top thirty lines is 15 to 20 minutes. Those are the honest numbers. The rest of this guide is where the minutes actually go, and how to claw them back.

I run a wet-led pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear. I've counted this place with a pen, with a spreadsheet, and with software I ended up building myself because the first two were eating my Sunday nights. So these aren't timings off a brochure. They're what it actually takes when the fridges need facing up and the phone keeps going.

The short answer, count by count

My own timings, modelled on a 200-line wet-led site: 150 packaged lines, 40 part-bottle spirit lines, 10 draught lines. Your mix will move the numbers about. The shape won't change.

Type of count	The counting	The maths after	Total
Weekly spot check, top 30 lines by value, on an app	15 to 20 min	None, done as you tap	15 to 20 min
Full count, app plus a kitchen scale	75 to 90 min	None	75 to 90 min
Full count, pen and paper or spreadsheet	75 to 90 min	45 min to 2 hours	2 to 4 hours
Your first ever count, any method	2 to 3 hours	Depends on method	Half a day, honestly
A professional stocktaker's visit	A couple of hours on site	Their problem	A morning, then wait for the report

Published stocktaking guides tend to say one to three hours for a single site, and that matches what I see, as long as you notice the small print: that's the counting. On paper, the counting is the easy half.

Where those numbers come from

Break a 200-line count down and the arithmetic is simple enough to check against your own bar.

Packaged stock is quick. Bottles, cans, sealed spirits in the store, if the shelves are tidy you're doing a line every ten to fifteen seconds. Call it 150 packaged lines in a bit over half an hour.

Part bottles are where methods split. Weighing one on a kitchen scale takes 15 to 20 seconds: bottle on, tap the number in, next. Guessing tenths by eye is faster, five seconds maybe, but you're trading the ten seconds you saved for a guess that's always kind to itself. I'd swear a bottle was a third full and the scale would say a quarter, over and over, and across forty optics that flattery is real money. Forty spirit lines weighed is under 15 minutes. That's the entire price of accuracy: one cup of tea's worth of extra time.

Draught is the slow bit per line. Dipping a cask or checking a keg means a walk to the cellar, and if your containers are calibrated properly you're at a minute or two per line including the walking. Ten draught lines, 15 to 20 minutes. If your calibration is wrong, no amount of speed helps, because the number you're writing down is fiction. I've covered that in the keg and cask calibration guide.

Add it up and the counting on my model site is about 75 minutes. Then add the slice you lose to real life: the delivery stacked in front of the mixers, the bottle of Disaronno that lives in three different places, the brewery ringing mid-count. Ninety minutes, door to door, is a fair full count with the library already set up.

Notice what that number doesn't include.

The maths after is what kills paper counts

On paper or a spreadsheet, the count is only half the job. Every line needs a cost price put against it. Every part bottle needs converting from "about six tenths" into pounds. Then it all needs summing, and checking against your deliveries and till sales, or you haven't done a stocktake, you've done a very slow list. At 15 to 30 seconds a line for looking up prices and typing, 200 lines is another 50 minutes before you've summed anything, and once you square it against deliveries and the till, two hours is a normal night.

That's the part that happens at the kitchen table at 11pm. That's the part people quietly stop doing, which is why so many pubs "do stocktakes" and still get ambushed by their audit result.

Software doesn't count faster than you. Weighing is actually slower per bottle than eyeballing tenths, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What an app does is delete the second half of the job. The prices are already against every line, the sums happen as you tap, and when you count the last line the valuation and the variance are just there. The 45 minutes to two hours of after-maths becomes zero. That's the entire case for stocktaking software in one sentence.

Your first count takes triple. Do it anyway

The first time you count properly, you're not just counting. You're building the product library: every line needs a name, a size, a cost price and a sell price, and if you're weighing spirits the software needs to know full and empty bottle weights. On 200 lines that setup is hours of work however you do it, and it's the reason most people's first proper stocktake swallows half a day.

Two things make it bearable. First, you only do it once. Count two is where the timings in the table above start applying, because the library already exists. Second, you don't have to start with everything. Load your top thirty lines by value and count those this week. Thirty lines is where most of the money leaks anyway, and a finished small count beats an abandoned big one every time. The full method is in my DIY pub stocktake guide.

What a professional stocktaker does in a couple of hours

A good stocktaker is fast. They count sites every working day, they bring their own product database so nothing needs setting up, and you walk them round rather than hunting for things yourself. Mine were in and out in a morning across the five independent audits I had between December 2025 and July 2026.

But the visit time is not the whole story. The number arrives later as a report, and the gap between count and report is where you sit not knowing. And if the result goes against you, the arguing takes a lot longer than the counting did. I've written about what a stocktaker costs and how a chargeback can be fought and reversed, and the short version is that a professional count a few times a year tells you what already happened. It doesn't tell you in week two that something started leaking in week one.

How often should you be counting?

The rhythm that works: a full count monthly, and a 15-minute spot check on your top lines weekly. Not because more counting is virtuous, but because of what variance means at different ages. A variance you catch in week two is a habit you can fix, a till button you can recode, a line clean nobody logged. The same variance discovered three months later is just a number on an audit you can't argue with. What counts as a normal gap is its own question, and I've put real figures on it in the acceptable variance guide.

Monthly full counts at 90 minutes plus weekly checks at 15 minutes is about three hours a month. A quarterly paper marathon is three to four hours a quarter and tells you everything too late. Similar time. Completely different value.

Getting a full count under the hour

• Count at the same dead hour every time, before open. Never during service, a count you keep pausing takes twice as long and misses things.
• Walk a fixed route: cellar, then bar, then fridges, then store, same order every count. Nothing gets counted twice, nothing gets missed, and you stop backtracking.
• Face up the fridges and tidy the store the night before. Ten minutes of tidying saves twenty minutes of squinting past labels.
• Don't count on delivery day. Stock in transit between the invoice and the shelf is how phantom variances get born.
• Two people, one calling and one tapping, takes a big bite out of the walking and the fumbling. Good spot-check training for your bar team too.
• Mix your methods. Weigh the spirits, case-count the packaged stock, dip the casks. Weighing a full sealed bottle answers a question the case count already answered.

None of that is clever. It's the difference between 90 minutes and three hours, which is the difference between a count that happens every month and a count that happens when you're feeling strong.