Student union bar stock control: built to survive the June handover

A student union bar is a pub where the management changes every June and the customers vanish for a third of the year. On top of that, the profit belongs to a charity, so every point of GP the bar leaks is money that was meant for sports kit and society budgets. Stock control in an SU fails in its own particular ways. Here's what actually goes wrong, and what any system has to survive before it's worth buying.

The June handover is where the money goes

Sabbatical officers serve a year. Committees turn over with them, and even where the bar has a permanent manager, the people that manager answers to are new every summer. Whatever lives in the outgoing treasurer's spreadsheet, or worse in their head, leaves the building with them: which lines actually sell, what the par levels are, what deal was agreed with the wholesaler and why, what last year's GP really was. The new committee inherits a till, a cellar and no numbers.

So that's the test to hold any stock system to, paper or software: would it survive a complete change of personnel in one week? A cloud system that keeps its own history does. A spreadsheet on a personal laptop doesn't, and the failure modes are the same ones I covered in the spreadsheet guide, with an annual deadline attached.

The committee can't fix a loss it can't see

Most of what I wrote about members' club stock control applies to an SU word for word, especially the five-number monthly page the committee actually reads. The difference is scale and duty. Union trustees are legally responsible for safeguarding the charity's assets, and the bar stock is usually the biggest pile of the union's money that isn't sitting in a bank account.

Put a number on the quiet version of failure. An SU bar taking £4,000 a week in drink across a 30-week trading year, drifting three GP points below where it should be, loses about £3,600 in the year. My arithmetic, and deliberately modest. Nobody stole it. It leaked through unrecorded wastage, wrong prices and uncounted lines while five busy students each assumed someone else was watching. A monthly page with stock value, GP against target and variance in pounds is what makes the leak somebody's job to stop.

The charity rules make GP matter more, not less

Selling drink to your own members at union events generally sits inside the charity's primary purpose trading. Open the bar to the general public and the picture changes: that's non-primary trading, and HMRC's small trading exemption only shelters so much of it. The bands are £8,000 of turnover where the charity's gross income is under £32,000, then 25% of income up to £320,000, capped at £80,000 above that. Unions with serious public trade usually route the bar through a trading subsidiary, and a subsidiary files real accounts, which is precisely the moment a committee discovers its stock figures need to be real too.

None of that is advice, it's the map. Your union's accountant knows which side of the lines you sit. The point for this guide is simpler: every structure on that map runs on accurate bar numbers, and a bar that can't say what it holds and what it made can't satisfy any of them.

Term time is a cliff, not a curve

Freshers' fortnight can outsell the whole of May. Then comes a summer where the bar takes nothing for twelve weeks. Ordinary pub par levels assume next week looks roughly like last week, and in an SU that assumption fails on a timetable: at freshers, at exams, at Christmas, at the summer shutdown.

Two habits deal with it. Set par levels per term, not per year, and let the order guide follow the teaching calendar rather than the calendar year. And run the cellar down hard before every shutdown. Cask has a 14-day best-before at delivery and even keg won't ride out a summer, so June's real job is selling the cellar to nearly nothing, and the last count of term is what stops dead stock quietly becoming the new committee's first write-off. The dates that matter are all in the cellar basics guide.

Student staff and the counting method

Bar teams churn every term, and the counting method has to survive that too. Eyeballing tenths on an open bottle of spirits is a skill, and a skill is exactly what a brand-new team doesn't have yet. Weighing isn't a skill. The bottle goes on the scale, the arithmetic is the system's problem, and two different students get the same answer where two eyeballs never do. I've set out the sums in the part bottles guide. Keep one permanent person, a steward or the bar manager, owning the count itself, and let the committee's job be reading the result. The person counting the stock shouldn't be the only person who ever sees the numbers, in any organisation, and in a charity that's just basic governance.

What the software should cost an SU

An honest limit before the sales pitch. A union running a bar, a shop and a café that wants one consolidated dashboard across all three won't get that from StockTap today. It does one venue at a time, properly: weighed counts, spot checks against the till, GP tracking and reports the committee can read, with CSV export for the accountant. At multi-outlet scale, look at the bigger hospitality systems and budget accordingly. For the bar itself, £19 a month against a £3,600 leak is not a difficult sum, and the software cost guide has the full market if you want to shop around.