One of the greatest barriers to performing your own stock take if you run a pub, bar or members club is the mystery of how to count those odd part used bottles and kegs.etc. this skill was always the reserve of the stock taker, a trained eye and years of experience of stocktaking justified their fees.  But all thats about to change for with my system any one can perform their own stock take and achieve very accurate results.  I have written my own excel based stocktaking software that allows any one in the licensed trade to perform the task with ease.

To count the stock that you used to have a trained eye to do can now be done, simply, quickly and above all accurately!

To view more details on my stocktaking software for the licensed trade priced at just £8.99 please visit my ebay shop Bar Management Services and Solutions

How?

By weight! yes alls you need is a set of digital kitchen scales for the bottles of spirits, wines and the bag in box post mix products and again wines.  heres a quick guide on how to do it.

Keg products.

1. Weigh a full keg of the product on the bathroom scales.  You will of course have to weigh both types of keg, steel and aluminium, (dont worry if you haven't got one of each for that product in the cellar at the moment for two reason's a] If you haven't got both types the chances are you have the type that matches the one your using b] you will have at least four weeks in which to have the other type delivered in)  Record the weight.
2. repeat this for all keg products in your cellar but not the cask, they are best dipped or side tapped to find their fullness.
3. Weigh one full pint of the products, this may be best done at line cleaning if your lines hold over a pint or over the quieter periods of the day.  Heres how to do it, and again remember there's no rush, your have four whole weeks to record your weights.

• First off all place an empty pint glass on your kitchen scales and weigh it in grams.
• next press tare or zero, on the scales.
• replace the empty glass with one exactly the same apart form it has a full pint of the product in it.
• The weight now shown is for one pint of the product, record it.

   4.  When you ready to perform your opening stock count, go to your cellar and uncouple the part used kegs and weigh them.

   5.  To find out the contents of keg you take the part kegs weight away from the full kegs weight (if do have the weight of a full keg of that type yet dont worry alls you have to do is record the part kegs weight and perform the calculation later when a full product of that type has been delivered)

  6.  Next divide the difference in weight of the two kegs by the weight of the pint of the product. This will give you the number of pints taht are missing from the keg.

  7.  Lastly take that number away fron the number of pints a full keg of that product should hold, i.e. an 11 should hold 88 pints.

you now know how many pints you have in that part keg.

  8.  Waite four weeks  and weigh the part kegs again and do the simple calculation to find out how many pints are in the keg. You now have both your closing stock count and you new opening stock count.

So to perform this tast you will need all the weights to be in the same units I suggest grams, its a simple case of weighing the kegs in Kg and multiply the result by 1000

Say a  full  steel keg weighs 60 kg thats 60,000g and a pint weighs 561g thats the two measurements  we have to record.

Now on stocktake day we weigh the part keg (which by luck happens again to be steel) and we record a weight of  18.77kg which is 18,770g

we take this from 60,000 which leaves 41,223 which then divide by 561 which gives you 73.48 pints missing from the 88 which means 14.5 pints are in the keg

Now my do your own stock take software has a calculation section that will record the control weights for you and perform all the calculations for you instantly, alls you would to do is weigh the kegs and enter the weight, that's it, job done!

The next job is to look at the wines and spirits.

The method is exactly the same as that for the kegs although you need not nessercery weigh a full bottle of each product.  Lines like liquors that sell mostly at Christmas you need only to weigh the part bottle and one measure, then just weigh the part bottle again when performing closing stock count.

This weighing of the bottles can easily be incorporated into your optic clean, saving you time by combining the two jobs and with stocktakers fees averaging about £100 a count if you took three hours to do the counts, which you wont anyway, you are earning yourself £33.33 an hour, now thats not bad money is it.

With post mix products you just need to weigh a full box and divide that weight by how many litres are in a full box. Next weigh the part box and take the difference away from the full box which will tell you how many litres are missing.  And then you take that figure away from the number of litres the full box should hold and you now know many litres  of  the product are in the part box.

My software will then process that information and tell you how much of the product you should have sold etc.