Is pub stocktaking software worth it? The payback maths, done honestly

Here's the short version. A pub taking £8,000 a week over the bar loses about £144 a month at a 0.5% stock variance and about £289 a month at 1%, measured properly against ex-VAT sales. The apps cost £19 to £79 a month. So the sum works if the software helps you find even a slice of that, and it doesn't work if you sign up and never count. This is the full payback maths, including the bits vendors leave out: your own time, what a stocktaker costs instead, and when the honest answer is don't bother.

I run a pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear. I've had five independent liquor audits in eight months, one of which ended in a £755 chargeback, so I've done this arithmetic with real money on the table rather than in a vendor's spreadsheet. Nobody selling stock software publishes an honest payback calculation. The ones I found while writing this were either generic ROI calculators with no pub in them or "book a demo and we'll tell you". So here's mine, workings shown.

What the software actually costs

Start with the easy side of the equation. I've priced the whole market in the software cost guide, but the short version: StockTap is £19 a month on the founding-member rate. Growyze is £948 a year, which is £79 a month. Nory starts at £2,148 a year. StockTake Online is £1,530 a year plus a £699 setup fee. Access Procure Wizard starts around £10,800 a year on a 36-month term, which is group money for a group product.

So call it £228 to £948 a year for the tier a single pub actually shops in. That's the cost you're trying to beat.

What stock loss actually costs you

This is the side nobody gives you straight, because the honest number depends on your takings and your variance, not on a scary industry headline. So work it from your own bar.

Take your weekly wet takings from the till. That figure includes VAT, and stock reports run ex VAT, so knock the 20% off first or your sums will flatter you. I've written up why that VAT trap catches so many licensees separately. £8,000 a week through the till is £6,667 a week of ex-VAT sales, which is £28,889 a month.

Now the variance. From my own audits and every operator report I've compared notes on, most pub companies treat anything inside ±0.5% of sales as normal and start asking questions around 1%. Four of my five audits landed inside three tenths of a per cent. The fifth came back at minus 1.08%, and that's the one that cost me £755.

Put those together and you get the number that matters:

Monthly cost of unexplained stock variance by weekly wet takings. Sales converted to ex VAT (takings ÷ 1.2), month = weekly × 52 ÷ 12. Author's arithmetic.

Weekly wet takings (inc VAT)	Monthly ex-VAT sales	Loss at 0.5% variance	Loss at 1% variance
£5,000	£18,056	£90/month	£181/month
£8,000	£28,889	£144/month	£289/month
£12,000	£43,333	£217/month	£433/month
£20,000	£72,222	£361/month	£722/month

Read your own row. If you're a £8,000-a-week wet-led site running at 1%, there's roughly £3,500 a year leaving the building unexplained. Against a £228-a-year app, the software doesn't need to be a miracle. It needs to help you find a fraction of the leak.

The five pints a month test

If the table feels abstract, here's the version I actually use. The average UK pint of lager was £4.89 in the Morning Advertiser's 2026 survey. Ex VAT that's £4.08. StockTap at £19 a month is covered by finding just under five of those pints a month. Not five a day. Five a month, across every optic and keg in the building.

One till button ringing a premium lager through as standard covers that on its own. One optic pouring generous covers it. I found both in my first month of weighing bottles instead of eyeballing them, which is the counting method I'd use whether you buy software or not.

Count your own time in, because vendors won't

Every ROI page skips this. Counting takes time and your time isn't free. Call a weekly count 90 minutes once you're practised. Even priced at the £12.71 National Living Wage, that's about £83 a month of labour. Price it at what your own hour is actually worth and it's more.

Two honest things follow from that. First, the real cost of weekly counting is your time, not the subscription, so the software's job is to make the count fast enough that you keep doing it. That's the whole argument for counting on a phone with the maths done for you instead of a clipboard and a calculator at midnight. Second, if a system takes so long that you quietly stop counting, its payback time is infinite. The most expensive stock system is the one you don't use, whatever it costs.

Software against a stocktaker, on pure money

The other thing your subscription competes with is a human. I've priced that market too, in the stocktaker cost guide: published independent rates run about £125 to £320 a visit, so monthly wet visits cost roughly £1,500 to £3,840 a year. Against £228 to £948 for an app, software wins the arithmetic easily.

But that's not the whole truth, and I'd rather you heard it from me. A stocktaker brings independent judgement, and when you're disputing an audit with your pub company, independent is the word that matters. Software gives you frequency instead: a count every week means a problem shows up in days rather than surfacing at the quarterly visit three months after it started. My £755 deficit built up over a whole audit period before anyone counted. On weekly numbers it would have shown its face inside a fortnight, at a fraction of the size.

Plenty of sensible sites run both, an app weekly and a professional twice a year. The combined cost is still less than monthly professional visits alone.

When it is not worth it

The vendors won't write this section, so I will.

If your variance already sits inside about ±0.3% of sales, audit after audit, and you keep a spreadsheet honestly and actually enjoy it, the payback on paid software is thin. You'd be buying convenience, not recovered stock. That's a fine reason to buy things, but it's not ROI, and I'm not going to pretend it is.

Same if you know you won't count. Software doesn't count your cellar for you. If the count isn't going to happen weekly whoever presses the buttons, save the subscription and book a quarterly stocktaker instead, because a professional four times a year beats an app used never.

And if your leak is one known thing, a till programming mess, say, you may not need a system to tell you. Fix the till buttons first. It's the cheapest stock improvement in the trade.

How fast the payback actually lands

In my experience the return isn't a smooth £50 a month drip. It arrives in lumps, and the first lump usually lands in month one, because the first proper count is when you discover the specific things nobody knew: the miscoded button, the keg on the wrong line, the drifting optic, the delivery that was signed for and never arrived in full.

The first count gives you a baseline. The second, a week later, gives you a direction. By the fourth you know whether your gap is froth and paperwork or something that walks. From there the return depends entirely on whether you fix what the numbers point at. The software finds the leak. You still have to plug it. If you want a feel for the size of yours before spending anything, put your own figures into the free GP profit leak calculator on this site.

That's the honest sum. Not "save 3% of turnover guaranteed". A cheap subscription plus a real cost in your own time, set against a leak that in most pubs is bigger than both put together, and findable.