Supplier price rises: catch them on the delivery note, not at the stocktake

Heineken UK put its draught list prices up by an average of 2.7% on 2 February 2026. Alcohol duty went up 3.66% the day before. Two rises in one week, and most pubs I know couldn't tell you what either did to their cost per pint by brand. They found out at the till, weeks later, as a GP% that had quietly slid two points. The fix is not a spreadsheet marathon. It's reading the delivery note like it's a bill, because that's what it is.

The February letter

Supplier price rises in this trade aren't random. They cluster around February, when the duty change lands and the brewers' annual pricing letters go out with it. This year Heineken UK averaged 2.7% across draught, excluding duty. Last year it was 2.97%. The year's duty uplift of 3.66% stacked on top of that, which is its own line on the sum, and I've broken down what duty costs per pint and per keg separately.

But the average is not the news. Inside that 2.7%, Amstel, Birra Moretti, Old Mout, John Smith's Extra Smooth, Heineken 0.0 and Inch's all went up, Murphy's was frozen, and Foster's actually came down. Packaged beer and cider were frozen entirely. If you run your pricing off "everything went up about 3%", you overcharge on the frozen lines, undercharge on the risers, and lose twice. The rise is line by line. Your response has to be line by line too.

What 2.7% does to a pint

Take a 50L lager keg at £160 ex VAT as a round working example. A 2.7% rise adds £4.32 to the keg. A 50L keg holds 88 pints, of which you'll sell 84 to 86 once froth and line cleaning have taken their legal share, so call it 85. That's 5.1p on the cost of every pint you actually sell.

Now the part everyone gets wrong. To keep your GP% where it was, you don't add 5p to the price. At a 65% wet GP, every pound of new cost needs £2.86 of new ex-VAT revenue to hold the percentage, because the cost is only 35p in each revenue pound. So 5.1p of cost needs 14.6p ex VAT, which is 17.5p on the shelf price once VAT goes back on. A five pence cost rise needs seventeen and a half pence on the pint just to stand still. That's the arithmetic almost nobody does, and it's why pubs that "put a bit on" every February still watch their GP% sag year after year. The full method is in the GP% calculation guide.

Why you never see it happen

Because nothing announces it. The order arrives, the driver's gone, the direct debit takes what it takes. The price change shows on paperwork you look at when something's short, not when something's dearer. Some suppliers move the case price, some shrink the case from 24 to 12 and hold the price, which is a 100% rise wearing a disguise. And after nineteen years behind the pumps I can tell you the brain reads a delivery note as "the usual order, all present", not as a row of prices. Checking quantities against the note is a habit most pubs have. Checking prices against last month is a habit almost none do.

The fifteen-minute method

You don't need software for this, you need a ritual. One page per supplier, physical or a note on your phone: product, last price paid, date. When the delivery lands, check your top ten lines by spend against that page before you file the paperwork. Not all two hundred lines. The top ten carry most of your money. Anything moved, write the new price, circle it, and decide the same week whether that line's shelf price moves with it. Initial and date the note so you know it was checked. Fifteen minutes a week, and February stops being a surprise you discover in April.

While you're at it, reconcile what was actually delivered against what's on the note before you sign, because shorts and substitutions corrupt your stocktake the same way silent price rises corrupt your GP.

Tied? Check the trigger before you just pay it

If you're a tied tenant of one of the six regulated pub companies, a price rise isn't always something you simply absorb. Under the Pubs Code, a significant increase in the price of tied products can trigger your right to a Market Rent Only option. The test compares what you're charged against the same four weeks a year earlier, and the thresholds are CPI plus 3 percentage points for beer, CPI plus 8 for other alcoholic drinks, and CPI plus 20 for everything else. The window to act is tight: 21 days from the invoice that shows the increase. Which is one more reason the invoice gets read the week it arrives, not the quarter after. I've covered the whole mechanism, including the live PCA investigation into how one pubco handles tenants, in the tied price rises guide.

Where software earns its keep

This is the one job where I'll say the app beats paper habits outright, because the paper habit depends on you having a good week. StockTap has a Scan Delivery Note feature: photograph the note, it reads each line, matches it to your product list and shows you the unit cost next to what you've been paying. You review it before anything commits, so a changed price is in your face on delivery day, and your GP is being calculated on this week's real cost instead of a number you typed in March.

Honest limits: it reads what's printed. If your supplier sends unpriced delivery notes with a monthly invoice, scan the invoice instead, or ask for priced notes, most will oblige. And no tool decides for you whether to reprice. It just makes sure you're deciding with the real number.

Reprice line by line, not across the board

When you do move prices, move the risers and leave the frozen lines alone. Check each line's GP% after the change against the category benchmarks rather than rounding everything to the nearest 10p and hoping. And don't be shy about it: the market average pint hit £5.34 this year, up 3.3% on the year before. Your customers are already paying the rise everywhere else. The only question is whether your prices moved because you did the sum, or because the bank balance finally forced you.