Stocktaking advice
How often should a pub do a stocktake?
The question we are asked most by new clients. The honest answer: it depends on your volume and your problems — but almost certainly more often than you are doing it now.
10 September 2026 · Craig Haugh, Apex Stocktaking
The short answer
Monthly is the standard for a bar or a food-led pub, and it lines up neatly with a trading period and your accounts. Weekly counts suit high-volume city bars and any site where a specific problem is being chased down. Annual counts are only good enough for a valuation for the accountant — by the time a yearly figure is bad, the money is long gone.
A good rule of thumb: the more money that passes through the tills between counts, the more a hidden leak costs you. A quiet rural pub can live with monthly. A busy late bar doing big weekend numbers should be looking at fortnightly or weekly until the numbers behave.
What waiting actually costs
Variance compounds. If a bar is losing €200 a week in unrecorded draught waste, over-poured spirits and unrecorded staff drinks, a monthly cycle means you spot it four weeks and €800 later. An annual count means you spot it €10,000 later, in a report nobody can do anything about.
The count itself is not the expensive part — the gap between counts is.
When weekly makes sense
Weekly counts earn their keep in three situations: high-volume sites where one bad week is real money; sites where a variance problem has been identified and is being fixed, so you want tight feedback; and sites with a new bar team or a new till setup, where habits are still forming.
Once the variance settles back into a healthy band, most sites ease back to monthly.
The cheaper way to count more often
The traditional objection to frequent stocktakes is cost — an external stocktaker on site every week adds up fast. That is exactly why we built the Self-Count model: your own team counts on our app, several people counting different areas at the same time, while we manage prices, purchases and reporting from the office. The per-count cost drops to roughly half, which makes weekly or fortnightly counting realistic for an ordinary pub.
Want this handled for you?
Apex takes stock in bars and kitchens across Ireland — managed stocktakes, or our lower-cost Self-Count model — with the full report in your hands the same day.