Why your till sales and your stock never quite match

What variance actually is

Variance is the gap between the stock you should have and the stock you counted. Opening stock plus purchases minus sales equals theoretical closing stock. Count the shelves and the difference between theory and reality is your variance — stock you paid for and never took money for.

It is valued at cost and at retail. The retail figure is the one that stings: it is the till money the missing stock would have become.

The causes, in order of likelihood

Over-pouring is the quiet one — a generous measure on every spirit adds up to bottles a week. Draught waste and line cleaning that never gets recorded. Staff drinks and giveaways with no docket. Breakages written off verbally. Deliveries short-shipped or entered twice. Wrong PLU buttons charging one product while pouring another, which corrupts two lines at once.

Kitchens have their own version: over-portioning, staff food, wastage and unrecorded transfers between venues.

What a healthy variance looks like

No site runs at zero. A well-run bar will usually hold its beverage variance within a couple of percent of sales. What matters more than any single period is the trend: a variance creeping up period on period is telling you something, even when each individual figure looks acceptable.

That is why every report we produce ranks the worst offending products and tracks the period-on-period trend — the pattern is the diagnosis.

How a stock audit tracks it down

Because we count line by line, product by product, variance is not one mysterious bottom-line number. It is 'this keg line is short, this vodka is short, everything else is clean.' That lets you fix causes instead of worrying about symptoms — retrain a pour, fix a PLU, record waste properly, or have a harder conversation.