If you're tied, pubco stock audits are part of the deal you signed. I've had five of them in the last eight months. Four came back within a couple of hundred quid of level. One showed a £755 deficit and turned into a chargeback, and getting on the wrong side of that number taught me more about audits than the four clean ones put together. Here's what actually happens on the day, and how to stop the day being a surprise.

The email lands, or sometimes it doesn't and there's just a stocktaker on your doorstep at 8am with a set of scales. Either way the visit runs the same.

Who turns up and what they do

Most pubcos use a professional stocktaking firm. The biggest name is Venners, who've been at it for 130 years and count for groups including Marston's, Greene King and Shepherd Neame. Their own service description tells you exactly what to expect: a standardised same-day stock report with a full debrief and an action plan before they leave. Some visits go further into compliance territory, and Venners lists till use analysis, brand inspections, due diligence checks, cash counts and banking checks among what an audit can include. Brand inspection matters if you're tied: they're checking what's on your bar came through your tie.

On the count itself, a good auditor weighs your open spirits, dips or weighs your kegs and casks, counts the packaged stock, and values the lot at selling price. Then they reconcile: last count's closing stock, plus everything delivered since, minus what the till says you sold, against what's physically there. The gap is your surplus or deficit, expressed in pounds and as a percentage of sales.

That reconciliation is the whole game. The auditor's count is usually accurate. The number that decides whether you get a difficult phone call is built from four inputs, and three of them (deliveries, till data, the previous count) were created before the auditor arrived.

Why a deficit usually isn't what it looks like

A deficit on an audit report reads like stock walked out the door. In my experience the boring explanations come first, and I wrote a whole guide on why the till doesn't match the stocktake. The short version: pints pulled and paid for before the count that the till already banked, wrong till buttons mapping a premium lager to a standard one, line cleaning waste never logged, ullage poured away without a note, deliveries counted on the wrong side of the cut-off, and part-bottles estimated by eye instead of weighed. None of that is theft. All of it lands in the deficit column if there's no paper against it.

How I prepare now

Do your own count the day before. If your number and the auditor's number disagree by more than the odd pint, you find out while it's still a conversation rather than an invoice. This is the single biggest change I made, and it's the reason four of my five audits were non-events.

Beyond that, have the boring stack ready: delivery notes since the last count, your waste and ullage log, the line cleaning record with dates, any prepaid or "one in the pump" pints written down, and your Z reads. Walk the auditor to the cellar, don't send them. And read the report before you sign anything, because the debrief is your one chance to challenge an input while the working papers are open.

If the number is wrong

Ask for the workings. You're entitled to see how the deficit was built, and an input error (a missed delivery credit, a transposed cask) is far easier to fix in week one than after a chargeback hits your account. Put your challenge in writing with your own count, your logs and your delivery notes attached. Paper wins these arguments; indignation doesn't.

If your pubco is one of the six regulated under the Pubs Code (Admiral, Greene King, Marston's, Punch, Star, Stonegate), it must have a Code Compliance Officer who is required to be reasonably available to answer Code enquiries from tied tenants. Be straight about the limits here: a stock deficit charge is mostly a contract matter between you and your pubco, not a Code breach in itself. But how it's handled sits inside a regulated relationship, the CCO exists to hear compliance concerns, and unresolved issues can go to the Pubs Code Adjudicator. If a bad audit lands in the same month as a price rise, know your rights on that too.

I dispute with documents. Paper is why my £755 deficit became a dispute with evidence attached rather than a bill I just paid. A dispute is not a war. It's an audit of the audit, and I've written up the chargeback mechanics step by step.

The real fix is never meeting your number for the first time on audit day

An audit every quarter tells you where you were three months ago. A count every week tells you where the leak is while the barrel's still on. Whatever variance the audit finds, you should have found it first, argued with it, and fixed it or explained it. The tenants who dread audits are the ones whose only stock number is the pubco's.

Common questions

How often do pubcos audit stock?

It varies by agreement and by how your last results looked. Quarterly is common, monthly if they're worried about you. A clean run of results tends to stretch the interval, which is one more reason to keep your own counts tight between visits.

Can I refuse a pubco stock audit?

Check your agreement, but almost certainly not, and refusing reads badly. Better to treat the audit as free professional data about your own pub and make sure nothing in it surprises you.

What deficit is acceptable on a pub stock audit?

There's no single figure. As a rule the conversation gets harder as you pass 1% of sales at retail value. Four of my five audits landed within about £200 either side of level, and that's the zone where nobody rings you.

Can a stock audit chargeback be reversed?

Sometimes, with evidence. Documented counts, waste logs and delivery notes are what turn a demand into a review. Dispute in writing, ask for the auditor's workings, and escalate to your pubco's Code Compliance Officer if you think the process itself was unfair.

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