How to stocktake a pub yourself, properly, without a stocktaker

Right, let’s get one thing straight: you don’t need a stocktaker to know where your money’s going. You need an hour, a notepad or a phone, and the discipline to actually do it the same way every single week. That’s it. I’ve been doing my own interim stocktakes for years — proper ones, with variance figures at the end — and the only thing that ever went wrong was when I got lazy about the method.

This isn’t an argument against professional stocktakers. If you’ve got the budget, a good one earns their fee back in found losses most months — I’ve written a whole guide on what a pub stocktaker actually costs in 2026 if you want that comparison. But plenty of pubs, especially single-site free-of-tie or small tenanted operations, can’t justify a monthly stocktaker on top of everything else. This is how you do it yourself without kidding yourself about the numbers.

What you’re actually trying to measure

A stocktake compares what you should have sold, based on what you bought, against what you actually sold, based on till reports — and the gap between the two is your variance. Get your opening stock, add deliveries in during the period, subtract closing stock, and that tells you your theoretical usage. Compare that theoretical usage (at retail value) against your till sales for the same period. The difference is your variance, and it’s usually expressed as a percentage of sales.

Do it weekly if you can manage it, monthly at minimum. Weekly catches problems while you can still remember what happened on a given shift. Monthly just tells you something went wrong four weeks ago and good luck working out what.

Step 1: count everything, the same way, every time

Buy a clipboard. Print a stock sheet listing every line you sell, grouped by category — draught, bottled, spirits, wines, minerals, snacks. Walk the cellar and the bar in the same physical order every time. This matters more than people think: if you count randomly you’ll miss things, and if you count in a different order each week you can’t spot-check against last week’s sheet by eye.

For draught, you’re counting part-full containers as well as full ones. This is where the cask and keg maths actually matters:

• A firkin (the standard UK cask size) is 9 imperial gallons — that’s 72 pints, or roughly 40.9 litres.
• A standard keg is 50 litres, which works out to about 88 pints.
• Weigh part-used casks/kegs where you can, or mark the tap level against a stick — guessing “about half” on a firkin is guessing at 36 pints, and that’s real money if you’re wrong by even 10%.

For bottled spirits and wines, count full bottles as whole units and estimate part-bottles to the nearest tenth. Don’t round up out of hope. Be brutal with yourself here — this is the single biggest source of “ghost stock” I’ve seen in my own counts, where you convince yourself a bottle’s got more in it than it does.

Step 2: know your legal measures cold, because they drive your yield maths

This bit isn’t optional and it isn’t just a compliance box-tick — it directly affects your theoretical yield calculation, so get it right.

Under the Weights and Measures (Intoxicating Liquor) Order 1988, as amended by the Weights and Measures (Specified Quantities) (Unwrapped Bread and Intoxicating Liquor) Order 2011, gin, rum, vodka and whisky must be sold in 25ml or 35ml, or an exact multiple of whichever you’ve chosen. You pick one — 25ml or 35ml — and use it consistently across every bar in the building, with a notice telling customers which one you’re pouring. You can’t run 25ml on one bar and 35ml on another in the same pub.

Here’s the bit that trips people up when they’re building their yield sheet: this rule applies to the “big four” spirits only — gin, rum, vodka, whisky. Liqueurs, fortified wines, and stuff like Baileys, sherry, port, vermouth and Cinzano aren’t covered by this spirit-measures rule at all. Where you see them served in 50ml, that’s the wine/fortified-wine measures convention, not a legal requirement in the same way. If you’re building a theoretical yield model and assuming every “spirits line” gets treated identically, you’ll get your variance wrong on that whole category. Split it out.

For your own sanity, the official reference for all of this — including draught beer/cider quantities (1/3, 1/2, 2/3 pint or multiples of 1/2 pint) and wine (125ml/175ml glasses, or multiples) — is the government’s own Business Companion “Selling alcohol in licensed premises” quick guide, which is the trading standards-facing plain-English summary of the actual Order. Worth bookmarking. If you want the trade-body training route on top of the legislation, the BII/Cask Marque Cellar & Bar Management course covers cellar yield and measure discipline as part of its accreditation — it’s the same standard the professional stocktaking firms train their own staff against.

Step 3: work out your theoretical yield

Once you know your legal pour, you can calculate how many measures you should get from a bottle or cask:

• A 70cl spirit bottle at 25ml pours = 28 measures. At 35ml = 20 measures.
• A firkin (72 pints) should yield 72 pints sold if you’re pulling clean pints with a proper 95%-liquid head (that’s the BBPA’s own minimum liquid guidance for a served pint — worth knowing even outside spirits).
• Multiply your theoretical measures by your selling price, and that’s your theoretical revenue for that container.

Compare theoretical revenue against what the till actually rang up for that line. That gap, across your whole stock sheet, is your variance.

Step 4: don’t panic at the first number — know what’s normal

A small variance every period is completely normal — spillage, free pours for regulars, a wonky optic, the odd short measure when it’s four-deep at the bar on a Saturday. What “acceptable” actually looks like, and when a number should worry you rather than just annoy you, is covered properly in the acceptable stocktake variance guide — read that before you lose sleep over one bad week.

Two other things that will wreck your numbers if you don’t account for them: deliveries that arrive but don’t get logged before the cut-off (see the guide on beer delivery delays and stocktake timing), and confusing net versus gross figures when you’re pulling sales reports — get that wrong and your whole variance percentage is meaningless. Sort your method for gross versus net properly first.

Step 5: decide whether DIY is actually right for you long-term

Doing it yourself is free, in the sense that it doesn’t cost cash — but it costs your time, and it only works if you’re disciplined about doing it the same way every period without fail. If you’re already stretched thin, a stocktaking app or a proper stocktaker earns its keep by removing that discipline problem. I’ve laid out the actual costs and what you get for them in the pub stocktaking software comparison guide — worth a read even if you stick with pen and paper, because it’ll show you what “good” looks like as a benchmark.

The bottom line

You can absolutely run your own stocktake to a professional standard. What you can’t do is fake the discipline — same order, same method, same day of the week, every time, with your legal measures and your cask maths right. Get that right and you’ll spot a leaking optic or a light-fingered shift before it costs you three figures instead of finding out four weeks later that it cost you thirty.

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