How it works
An afternoon to set up. An hour a week to run.
No consultant visits, no equipment order, no three-month onboarding. Here is exactly what you and your team actually do.
Setup
Done once, at the start
Budget an afternoon. You can start counting before the recipes are finished — the counting works from day one, and variance gets sharper as you fill things in.
1.Add your products
1–2 hours, onceName, size, cost and supplier for everything you pour. Import a CSV if you already keep a list — most venues have one from their distributor.
2.Map your storage areas
30 minutes, onceMain bar, back bar, walk-in, store room. Put the products in each area in the order they physically sit. This is the step that makes counting fast, so it is worth doing carefully.
3.Enter your recipes
1–2 hours, onceWhat goes into each drink, in millilitres or ounces. Start with your twenty best sellers — that is usually 80% of your volume. You can add the rest later.
4.Set par levels
30 minutes, onceRoughly 1.8× a normal week's usage is a good starting point. Adjust once you have a few periods of history.
Every week
The loop
About 90 minutes end to end, most of it the count itself.
Count
~1 hourOne person, one phone. Walk each area in shelf order. Sealed bottles get a tap; open bottles get a slider or a scale reading. No signal needed — everything syncs when you're back in range.
Import sales
2 minutesExport the week's item-level sales from your POS and upload the CSV. Rows that don't match a menu item are flagged so nothing is quietly ignored.
Log deliveries
5 minutesEnter each supplier invoice with its line items. This also refreshes your product costs, so a price rise never hides inside your margin.
Read the variance report
10 minutesProducts sorted by what they cost you, worst first. Work the top five. Check the pour spec before assuming theft — over-pouring explains most of it.
Order back to par
5 minutesEverything below its reorder point, grouped by supplier, with quantities already worked out. Copy it into an email and you're done.
Questions
The ones everyone asks
How long until I see something useful?
Your first count is an opening balance — it has nothing to compare against. The second count closes the first period, and that is when the variance report appears. For most venues that means about a week.
Do I need to count everything, every time?
Count the same things in the same order every time. Consistency matters more than precision: a count that is always 2% optimistic still shows the right trend, whereas a count that skips the store room one week is worse than useless.
What if my numbers look wrong?
Almost always one of three things: a recipe portion is wrong, a delivery hasn't been logged, or a shelf was missed. Re-count the product with the biggest variance before drawing any conclusions about staff.
Does my POS need to integrate?
No. CSV export works with every POS on the market and is what most venues start with. Direct integrations remove the weekly export step and are part of the Growth plan.
Do I need to buy a scale?
No. The slider handles open bottles at about ±5% accuracy, which is enough to find a real leak. A Bluetooth scale takes that to roughly ±1% and is worth it once you are chasing the last few points.
Who should do the counting?
Whoever is most consistent — usually a bar manager or a trusted senior bartender. Having the same person count each week removes a whole class of noise. Some venues deliberately rotate it as a control measure.
Your first report is one week away
Count today, count again next week, and you'll know exactly what you're losing.
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