Restaurant stock control software UK: what it costs, and which side of the pass it actually covers

Stock control in a restaurant is two different jobs wearing one name. The kitchen job is recipes, yield and a stack of supplier invoices. The bar job is open bottles, kegs and a till that says you sold more than you poured. Most software does one of those jobs well and waves at the other, and published prices run from £0 to about $449 a month depending on which side you're buying. Here's who covers what, on the vendors' own published prices, and the questions that sort a shortlist faster than any feature list.

I should say who's writing this. I'm a pub licensee in Washington, Tyne and Wear, not a restaurateur, and my product, StockTap, is drinks-first. If you need plate costing to the gram I'm not going to pretend I'm your answer, and I'll show you who actually is. What I do know is the wet side, where restaurants leak money in exactly the same quiet ways pubs do, and I've sat through five independent liquor audits in eight months learning what those leaks look like on paper.

The two jobs, properly separated

Kitchen stock dies by yield. A whole salmon isn't a salmon's worth of portions, it's what's left after skin, bones and trim, and if your recipe costing doesn't know that, every menu price is built on sand. The kitchen also generates several times the invoice volume of a wet-led bar, from more suppliers, with prices that move more often. So kitchen-first software is built around invoices and recipes: scan the paperwork, keep cost prices current, cost the dish, compare theoretical usage against what the till sold.

Bar stock dies in the open bottles. A sealed case counts itself, but the money hides in the forty part-used bottles behind the bar, the keg that's two-thirds gone, and the difference between what the till rang and what left the shelf. That's a physical counting problem, and no amount of invoice scanning touches it. I've written a full guide to bar inventory management and another on getting drinks GP right ex VAT, and both boil down to the same thing: the report is only as good as the count.

Keep those two jobs separate in your head and every product on the market suddenly makes sense, because each one grew up solving one side.

The kitchen-first tools

MarketMan is the name you'll hit first, and it publishes pricing, in dollars even for UK buyers: Starter at $249 a month, Growth at $299, Enterprise from $449, checked 5 September 2026. For that you get recipe costing, actual-versus-theoretical variance against your POS, waste logging and invoice scanning, with UK supplier EDI on the list. It's a serious kitchen system priced like one, and if you're a group with a head chef who lives in spreadsheets, it will feel like a rescue.

Jelly is the strongest UK-grown option for a food-led independent: £129 a month per location, flat, built around invoice scanning that keeps cost prices current, live GP and links to Square, Epos Now, Lightspeed and Toast. I've written a full and fair look at Jelly, and my honest read is that for a food-led site drowning in supplier paperwork the flat fee is defensible. Kitchen Cut sits above both, quote-only, aimed at larger multi-site operations, and MarginEdge is a US-grown system at around $350 a location that some UK groups run. If a vendor won't publish a price, budget accordingly and get everything in writing; the cost guide covers what quote-only tends to mean.

Growyze is the interesting one because it straddles the line: £79 to £139 a venue, barcode counting, invoice reconciliation and six UK till integrations, with a 30-day no-card trial. I've just published a full guide to Growyze and its alternatives if it's on your list.

The bar side, which is where restaurants leak quietly

Here's the thing I see restaurants get wrong, and it costs them steadily rather than dramatically. The kitchen gets all the stock discipline, because food GP is scrutinised on every menu change, and the bar gets a shelf count once a quarter if that. But the bar is where the classic leaks live: over-pours, spillage, wrong till buttons, comps nobody logged, a keg that yielded 80 pints instead of 88. None of that is anybody stealing. It's what happens to any bar that isn't counted properly, and it never announces itself, because every kind of loss looks identical on a variance line until you diagnose it.

The bar needs three things the kitchen tools mostly don't do: a real method for part-used bottles (weighing them beats eyeballing tenths, which is why I built StockTap around a phone and a set of scales), quick spot checks on your top sellers between full counts, and drinks GP tracked ex VAT by product. That's the whole job. It's smaller than the kitchen job, but it's the one nobody's watching, which is exactly why it leaks.

Who covers which side

Published pricing, checked September 2026. The wider comparison across more vendors is in the comparison hub.

UK restaurant stock control options by which side of the pass they cover, from each vendor's published pages. Prices change; confirm before signing.

Option	Price	Kitchen side	Bar side
MarketMan	$249 to $449 a month	Strong: recipes, AVT, waste, EDI	Counts it, but no open-bottle method on its pages
Jelly	£129 per location, flat	Strong: invoice scanning, live GP	Same open-bottle question; ask in the demo
Growyze	£79 to £139 per venue	Good: reconciliation, price alerts	Barcode plus stocksheets; part-bottles by eye
Kitchen Cut	Quote-only	Strong, multi-site, enterprise	Not the focus
StockTap	£19 (Pro), £39 (Premium)	Not my game: no recipe costing	Strong: weight-based counts, spot checks, GP by product
Spreadsheet	£0	Works with discipline	Works until part-bottles beat it

Notice what that table implies: a truly food-led restaurant with a serious bar may end up running one system per side, or accepting that its single system does one side properly and the other side roughly. That's not a sales trick, it's just what the products are. A £129 kitchen system plus a £19 bar counter is still £148, less than one MarketMan tier, and each tool is doing the job it was actually built for.

Picking by the shape of your restaurant

Food-led independent, one site, big menu, modest bar: buy the kitchen tool first. Jelly at a flat £129 or MarketMan if you want AVT depth and can carry the dollar price. Run the bar on a disciplined monthly count, and the moment wet sales pass roughly a third of your mix, start counting the bar properly too.

Wet-led with food, gastropub shape, bar doing the heavy lifting: your risk profile is a pub's. Count the bar accurately and often, weigh the open bottles, spot-check the top twenty lines weekly, and keep the kitchen on a tight sheet with your top ten ingredients. Here's the counting cadence that actually works, and it transfers straight across.

Group or small chain: transfers between sites become the leak nobody owns, the same problem hotels have with multiple outlets. I covered it in the hotel bar guide, and the answer is the same: every movement gets recorded at the moment it happens or your site-level variance is fiction. Look at Premium tiers with stock transfers, or enterprise kitchen systems, and ask hard questions about who books a case of wine walking from site A to site B on a Friday night.

The one-month test before you pay anyone

Whatever's on the shortlist, run this before signing: pick your top twenty bar lines by value and your top ten kitchen ingredients. Count them properly at the start of a month, at the end, and pull the till's product-level sales between. The gap is your real variance, and now you know what you're buying software to fix. If the gap is small, congratulations, buy nothing and keep doing what you're doing. If it isn't, you now have a number, and every demo becomes a simple question: show me exactly how you'd have caught this. Take the buyer's checklist in with you, and make any vendor with a bar in scope count an open bottle in front of you.

Common questions

What does restaurant stock control software cost in the UK?

On published pages as of September 2026: Growyze £79 to £139 a venue, Jelly £129 a location flat, MarketMan $249 to $449 a month billed in dollars, MarginEdge around $350 a location, StockTap £19 to £39 for the bar side, and enterprise tools like Kitchen Cut are quote-only. A working spreadsheet is £0 and beats no counting at all.

Do I need separate systems for food and bar stock?

Not always, but know which side your system was built for. Kitchen-first tools are built around invoices and recipe costing; bar stock needs a physical method for part-used bottles that most kitchen tools don't set out. Some sites run one system per side, which can still cost less than one enterprise tier.

What's the best stock control software for a small independent restaurant?

Food-led: Jelly's flat £129 or Growyze from £79 are the strongest published-price options. Wet-led: count the bar first, with weight-based counting from £19, and keep the kitchen on a disciplined sheet. Budget tight: a good spreadsheet and a monthly count beat an unused subscription every time.

Does restaurant stock software integrate with UK tills?

The published lists as of September 2026: Jelly links Square, Epos Now, Lightspeed and Toast; Growyze links Square, ICRTouch, Clover, GoEpos, Newbridge and Squirrel; MarketMan integrates POS plus UK supplier EDI. Integration moves your product-level sales automatically, and a CSV export does the same job manually if your till isn't listed.

Is a spreadsheet enough for restaurant stock control?

For a small site with discipline, yes, for a while. It stops being enough when part-used bottles, invoice volume and till mapping start eating hours or hiding variance. The honest breakdown of when to switch is in the spreadsheet guide, and money spent on software you don't use is worse than £0 spent on a sheet you do.