Stocktaking software for a micropub or small bar: what you actually need, and what it should cost

A micropub or a small bar with forty to eighty lines doesn't need most of what pub stocktaking software sells. It needs three numbers a week: what the casks and kegs actually yielded, what the open spirits are really holding, and what that adds up to against the till. Everything priced per venue at £79 and up is built for somewhere with a kitchen, a cellar team and a finance person. This is what a small site actually needs, what it should cost, and where a spreadsheet is still the right answer.

I run a wet-led pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear, bigger than a micropub, and I built StockTap because the tools I could find were priced for groups. So I'm not neutral. But the sizing argument stands whoever you buy from.

What a micropub is, for the purposes of counting

The Micropub Association's definition is a small freehouse that mainly serves cask ale, promotes conversation and shuns electronic entertainment. The first modern one, the Butchers Arms in Herne, opened in 2005. For stock purposes what matters is the shape of the range: a handful of casks on gravity or a small stillage, a few kegs at most, a shelf of spirits, some bottles and cans, wine by the glass, and snacks. Call it forty to eighty live lines, with cask doing most of the volume.

That shape changes what goes wrong. In a big pub the leaks are spread across a hundred draught and spirit lines and you need software to see the pattern. In a micropub the leaks are concentrated in two places, cask yield and the open spirits, and the rest is small change. So the tool has to be good at those two things and cheap enough to justify against a bar that might take £3,000 a week.

The two numbers that matter

Cask yield

A 9-gallon firkin is 72 pints on paper. It never gives you 72. Sediment, the ullage you draw off, the last inch you won't serve, a pint that goes cloudy, the odd top-up. What you actually sell from a firkin is the single most important number in a cask-led bar, and most people don't know theirs. If you're getting 66 and think you're getting 70, you're pricing every pint on a lie of about 6%. On £2,000 a week of cask that's over £100 a week you think you've got and haven't.

So whatever you use has to let you record, per cask, what went on, what came off in waste, and what the till sold, and give you a yield per cask and per beer. Some beers and some brewers consistently yield worse than others. You'll only see that with the data written down over a couple of months. The full maths is in how to calculate GP% on pub drinks, including the 88-pint keg that's really 84 sellable pints.

Open spirits

Even a micropub has fifteen or twenty open bottles on a shelf, and in a small bar they're a bigger share of the value than they look. The problem is how they get counted. Eyeballing tenths is always kind to whoever's holding the bottle. A bottle called at four tenths is often three. Across twenty bottles, that's a few hundred pounds of stock that exists on the sheet and not on the shelf.

Weighing fixes it. Bottle on a kitchen scale, the tool knows the full and empty weights, out comes the millilitres. Twenty bottles is about seven minutes. This is the one thing a spreadsheet cannot do for you, because it doesn't know what an empty bottle of Whitley Neill weighs and you're not going to type it in for every brand.

What a small site does not need

Purchase ordering integrated with six wholesalers. Recipe costing for a menu you haven't got. Multi-site consolidated dashboards. AI demand forecasting. Supplier invoice OCR. A team permissions matrix for a bar where the team is you and your partner and a Saturday lad. Every one of those is a real feature that somebody needs, and every one of them is a reason the price starts at £79 a venue. If you're paying for them, you're subsidising a group's requirements out of a micropub's margin.

What you do need is short. Count by weight for spirits, by dip or gravity check for casks, by the case for bottles. Real cost prices ex-VAT. A sales figure per line from the till, by upload if it has to be. A variance in pounds per line. Working with no signal, because plenty of micropubs are in an old shop unit with a signal that dies at the back. And a monthly price you can cancel.

What it should cost for a micropub

Put that against what you're likely losing. If the cask yield is 6% off what you think and the open spirits are a tenth generous, a bar doing £3,000 a week can be £150 a week adrift without a single dishonest thing happening. That's £7,800 a year. The software question isn't whether £228 or £948 is a lot. It's whether the tool finds the £7,800 in the first month, which any of them should, and whether you'll keep using it in month six, which is where price and friction start to matter.

When the spreadsheet is the right answer

Sometimes it is. If you've got under forty lines, no spirits to speak of, you're gravity-only cask and you already write down every cask that goes on and comes off in a book, a spreadsheet does the job. Cask yield is arithmetic. What it won't do is weigh a bottle, catch a formula you broke in March, or show you the trend without you building the chart. I ran my own spreadsheet system for years before I built anything, and I wrote up where it broke and where it didn't. For a tiny cask-only bar, read that before you pay anyone anything, including me.

Setting one up for a small bar in an afternoon

Don't load your whole range. Load the spirits, the casks and kegs you currently have on, and the top ten packaged lines. Thirty to forty products. Put real cost prices in from the last invoices. Weigh every open spirit once, record every cask that's on with the date it was tapped and the dip. That's your opening stock, and it's an hour.

Then do the same count a week later. The tool gives you a variance per line. Cask yield will be the first thing that jumps out. If it says you got 63 pints from a firkin, you've either got a waste problem, a top-up problem, or a firkin that was short, and now you know to look. That's the whole game for a micropub. Everything else in the feature list is for someone else's pub.

If you want the weighing and the cask yield without the group price, that's exactly the gap StockTap was built for. The trial is fourteen days and needs no card, so a wasted evening is the worst case.