Stocktaking with SumUp: the free stock counter, the £39 margin report, and the keg it can’t count

SumUp's stock tracking is free on every plan and does a decent job on anything you sell as a whole unit. The margin report is the bit to think twice about: cost prices and margins are a POS Plus feature at £39 a month on a 12-month contract, and on draught that report works out your GP as if every pint in the keg reached the till. It never does.

This is the fourth till in the series, after Epos Now, Zettle and Square. Same rules as before. Everything I say about SumUp comes from SumUp's own help centre and price pages, checked today, and I'll be straight about where a till stops and a count starts.

What the free stock side does

Tracking is switched on per item. In your SumUp profile or the app you go to Items, then Inventory, flip the Enable tracking toggle, type in what you've got and, if you want, a stock code. From then on every sale through the item catalogue knocks the number down on its own. Restocking is a pencil icon and a number, and their help page has a nice touch: type +20 and it adds twenty rather than replacing the figure.

The colours tell you where you stand. Orange when an item drops below the Low Inventory Level you set, red when it hits zero, and at zero the till puts a Sold Out label on the button. Anything you don't track is treated as infinite and never sells out.

For bottles, cans, crisps and nuts that is all a small bar needs from a till. One case in, 24 on the count, sales knock it down, and the orange warning becomes your ordering prompt if you set the level like a par level: a delivery cycle of cover plus a weekend.

Do not track a keg as units on SumUp

Here is where it bites. If you set a keg up as an item with 88 in stock, SumUp has no idea that 88 is the best case. Line cleaning and fobbing come out of the same keg without a sale, so the till runs out of pints on paper while you've still got beer, or the keg blows while the till still says 9 left.

SumUp's own page is admirably honest about the first half of that. Sold Out items can still be added to an order, the count just goes negative, and in their words that can "lead to mismatches between the software's stock count and actual inventory". On draught that mismatch is the whole job. Leave draught untracked on the till and count it properly, by weighing the keg or dipping the cask, against what was rung.

The £39 question: the margin report

On the free plan you get the stock counts. To add a cost price to an item and have profit and margin appear in your items report, SumUp's help page says plainly that you need POS Plus. That is £39 a month excluding VAT, billed monthly on a 12-month contract, with a 30-day free trial. Read the renewal line before you sign: if you don't cancel before the year is up, it renews for another 12 months.

So that is £468 a year, plus VAT, and here is what the margin figure is actually doing. It takes the price you rang and the cost you typed in and does the sum per sale. Take a pint at the £5.34 national average, which is £4.45 once you take VAT out. Cost it at £1.56 a pint, which is an 88-pint keg bought at £137.28. The report shows 64.9% GP on every pint you ring.

Now suppose that keg only puts 80 pints through the till once cleaning, changeover and drip have had their share. The real cost of each pint you sold is £1.72, and your real GP on that line is 61.4%. Eight pints, £35.60 of sales, gone from every keg, and the report shows 64.9% throughout because it can only see the rung pints. That is not SumUp being bad. It is every till that works out margin from a typed cost price. The gap between the two numbers is your achieved GP, and only a count finds it.

My view: pay for POS Plus if you want what it's actually built for, which on their list is floor plans, QR ordering, multiple printers, till management, employee PINs and Sage, QuickBooks or Xero sync. Don't pay £468 a year for the margin column alone.

The plumbing: getting your list in and out

SumUp's comparison of Free and Plus lists importing and exporting the items list on both, along with selling in units of measure and setting low-stock alerts. You can bulk add items in one category from the web profile, and there is a feature that builds items from a photo of your price list, which I'd treat as a first draft and check line by line, because a misread price on a till button is a GP problem from the first pint.

The export is the useful part for stock. Your whole product list comes out as a file, which means you are never locked in and you can feed it straight into whatever you count with.

The X report is for the till, not for people

If you use Till Management on POS Plus, SumUp gives you two reports. A Z report closes the till, counts the cash and resets the counters. An X report is a read-only snapshot you can pull at any time without closing anything, and it can be run for a single employee.

That per-employee option is handy at a shift handover: run an X report at the changeover, do a quick count of the five lines that matter, and the next shift starts clean. Use it to put a time on a gap, not a name. A variance that lines up with one person's shifts is usually a method difference, a different pour or a different button, and that's a ten-minute conversation, not a disciplinary.

The fee plan most pubs on SumUp haven't looked at

Pay-as-you-go is 1.69% per card payment with no monthly charge, which is 9.0p on a £5.34 pint. SumUp also sells Payments Plus at £19 a month (or £189 a year), which drops in-person payments on domestic consumer cards to 0.99%, or 5.3p a pint. Corporate, premium and international cards, American Express included, stay at 1.69%.

The break-even is one sum. The rate gap is 0.70%, so £19 a month pays for itself once you take about £2,714 a month on ordinary consumer cards. SumUp's own pages pitch it at £3,000 to £3,300 a month, which is a safer figure once you allow for the premium cards that don't get the discount. A pub taking a few thousand a week through the reader is past that in the first week. The card fees guide compares the pay-as-you-go rates across providers; if you're on SumUp, this plan changes your numbers.

On the older SumUp POS Pro

Some pubs run SumUp POS Pro, the bigger hospitality till with its own back office. Its stock report is a different screen, and SumUp's help note says Pro customers who signed up from December 2022 use the in-app stock feature rather than the back-office one. Same principle either way: it counts sales, not liquid.

Does StockTap plug into SumUp?

Not natively, and I'd rather say that flat out than hint at a sync that doesn't exist. What works today is the same file round trip as the other tills in this series: export your items from SumUp, import them into StockTap, count by weighing or tenths, then type the till's total into the daily spot check and read the variance line by line. My own 270-line library took a few minutes each way, and you only do the full trip once at setup.

Common questions

Can SumUp do a full pub stocktake on its own?

No. It keeps sensible unit counts on bottles, cans and snacks and knocks them down per sale. Draught and open spirits need a physical count, because the till records what was rung, not the liquid used, and the difference between those two numbers is where a pub's stock loss lives.

Is SumUp inventory tracking free?

Yes. Tracking, low-stock levels and the Sold Out label are on the free plan. Adding cost prices so profit and margin show in the items report is a POS Plus feature, £39 a month excluding VAT on a 12-month contract.

Is SumUp Payments Plus worth it for a pub?

Usually, if most of your takings go through the reader. It's £19 a month and drops domestic consumer card payments from 1.69% to 0.99%. The rate gap pays the fee at about £2,714 a month of ordinary consumer card takings; SumUp suggests £3,000 to £3,300 to allow for premium cards, which stay at 1.69%.

Which till is this series doing next?

ICRTouch. If yours isn't covered yet, the EPOS integration guide covers making any till and any stock system work together.