How would one keep accurate track of a bar pour count? Is there some sort of spread sheet for this?
There are very expensive pour regulators available.
If you don’t want to invest in that kind of money, I would reccommend doing inventory counts at the beginning and end of each shift for two - three days and tying the counts back to sales.
When you count hard liquor, use a ruler to get your tenths right and make sure that you (or the same person) does it for each count. Every one has a different eye and if you are not consistant , it will skew your cost estimates (which is what I assume you are trying to get to?)
As for spread sheets, try the Nation Restaurant Assn. site, I am pretty sure they just did a series on beverage costs and monitoring them.
What type of POS are you using?
There are also some very inexpensive ones $3.50 each by the dozen, and the usually last well more than a year. Notice how they offer different capacity pour models.
They make a bulb type, which I don’t like but people who use them swear they’re better.
Whatever pourers you use, they’re extremely more accurate than all the hold-fashioned bartenders’ methods (whether it be a count, by eye, or the ice cube method).
I’m partial to, though don’t use, the upside down pourers (you see them alot more in the UK then here in the US) which come either deck mounted, wall mounted or on a spinning wheel.
Certain sweet liquors, especially bourbon, should always remain capped. Even if you have pourers with the little flap door covering the hole and haven’t ever seen a fruitfly, trust me they’ll find you…even if they have to travel 20 miles, they’ll smell your Wild Turkey, and find a way to squeeze in and drown in bliss.
As far as accounting for sales, the ruler method is still the best. Whether you wanna do it on Excel or on a wide sheet of ledger paper is totally up to you. In my opinion, especially if we’re talking about a neighborhood bar, you don’t need a point-of-sale system. Remain skeptical of automating a cash business. Your accountant will probably say the same thing. A simple Casio Cash Register will do fine. All you have to do is program in pour codes for each drink (1=Budweiser, 2=Coors Light, 20=Skyy, 50=Dewers, etc., etc.) and post them for your barstaff to use.
As an inventory person I can see where rulers would be effective but wouldn’t net weight be better. Weigh the new bottle when it “enters” inventory then just weigh the empty bottle when you’re done to come up with the bottle weight. A decent digital scale is not real expensive and will be both accurate and very easy to use. A digital scale is also less subject to interpretation. You can pretty easily zero a scale with a glass on it to find the weight of liquor X at your desired “serving size.” You only have to do it once since I would imagine a brand of liquor will strive to be consistent in its composition.
Once you have a basic set of #'s on liquor X you should be able to do some very accurate assessments of your product cost maybe even seeing evaporation effects if your scale is measuring in small enough units.
[bump] Any bartenders restaraunt managers care to comment…I’m kinda curious why this is not common practice if product cost is a concern?
Did liquor inventory for awhile. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken if I’d weighed each open bottle every week. I estimated the levels by eye, and turned in my report to the manager.
It depends on what you’re after, I guess–if you’re worried that the bartenders are overpouring, or underpouring for that matter, you can get one of the devices JohnBckWLD mentioned–the ones we used regulated the amount that could be poured at one time, they just stuck in the top of the bottle like regular pourers.
If more straight-ahead employee theft is what you suspect, perhaps you can compare the number of drinks rung up with the amount gone from inventory–off by a few drinks shouldn’t be a problem, so I don’t see the point of rulers or scales, but if you can’t account for bottles or cases, this should be readily apparent.
Of course, the place I worked was rife with theft, but management never did anything to stop it, even though I presume it showed up in my inventories. I can’t tell you how glad I am I don’t work there anymore.
Bren Cameron is right. It would be very cost prohibitive to weigh each bottle in a well stocked bar. The easiest thing really is a count at the beginning and end of every shift and then tying that count back to items sold from your point of sale system.
In any control system, there are trade offs and while no matter what you do there will be theft, as there will be breakage and giveaways, you do what you can to minimize the theft. Spending a day’s labor (possibly more) weighing bottles would have to be offset by some pretty big improvements in accuracy over using your eye and a ruler. Also, remember that good illusions of control, also go toward control itself. Counts, spotters and random drawer pulls, while not fullproof, at least let people know you are watching.
Upside down pourers are also called optics if you’re googleing
Out of curiosity, why would weighing a bottle on a digital scale take longer than measuring each bottle’s alcohol level with a ruler? Especially since bottles can vary in diameter and you’d have to take that into account when determining how much volume each “should” have lost.
Or the other way around…look at POS records and check the items that should have been used for appropriate usage.
I tend to 7.5 million(@retail) in product…across 7000 SKU’s trust me…I understand. With any register system it is simple enough to have a “freebie” payment method button and ring it up as a comped drink… As long as they don’t abuse the freebie button you have good control again. If you want to be more specific you can allow each bartender $20 in “freebies” a night or whatever amount is appropriate for the scale of your business and level of percieved service desired. Bartenders who average significantly more or less freebies than most can be observed to check for appropriate levels of service/product handling
Weight will be far more accurate than any visual method. Two magic terms could make a world of difference in how this is done.
Cycle counts
ABC distributuion.
Just a small nitpick, that won’t tell you if someone didn’t ring something you didn’t count. ie if your POS said you sold only 15 beers and according to your counts your inventory of beer has decreased by 15, that tells you nothing about the 6 bottle of wine given away or broken or lost or stolen. You really have to count everything - especially if you suspect that something may be wrong. There are also many programs for beverage potenials that can help determine what cost you should run at vs what you are actually running at.
I also have at least a few articles on this stuff that I amy look at later if anyone really wants any more info. I see that the OP has not responded in some time so I’m not sure that this has helped them…
When I was a bartender at a fancy hotel in New Orleans, I asked the manager why he didn’t care much for these kinds of controls. He said, “Look, we only pay $10 - 15 for a whole bottle of house liquor and sell it for $4 - $6 a drink. It is impossible to lose money on that kind of deal. Sometimes its good business to give away drinks or pour heavy if that’s what people want.”
That made perfect sense to me and now I get really irritated as a customer if I go into a bar and they make their bartenders use an automated pourer.
I guess it would be different if employees were giving away bottles of expensive wine or stealing fine Scotch but that is easy enough to keep in a limited access area anyway.
If you weigh, you have to take the bottles off the shelves and put them on the scale. If you use a ruler (which I didn’t when I did inventory) I’d imagine you’d just need to maybe shift some things a bit to get your ruler in place.
I don’t doubt that weighing would be much more accurate, but I question the need to be exactly that accurate. I wouldn’t worry about a few freebies (although I do like the idea of a “freebie key” on the register). Nor would I worry about staff occasionally having a drink at the end of their shift. Of course, I haven’t done that sort of thing for a living for quite awhile, and others may be more experienced than I am.
You’d think. That doesn’t work if the persons with access are the ones doing the stealing, or if the closing manager assumes his priveleges include a bottle of fine wine with his dinner, or the right to drink the most expensive Scotch in the house on a nightly basis.
Yeah, I’d pretty much agree. And that’s another reason why I don’t see the utility of weighing bottles for that perfect inventory. As I said, you kind of assume a small amount of slippage for freebies and such anyway. What you’re trying to catch isn’t the occasional drink after shift, but the bottles that are walking out, or the bartenders that are drinking as much as they’re selling. You don’t need fine measurements to catch that.
Which it why I mentioned Cycle counting and ABC.
Example:
A items that you sell alot of Counted daily (top 20% of all usage)
B items counted every third day or maybe weekly
C items counted maybe monthly.
200 C items spread across 30 days is pretty reasonable.
Low demand items can be counted less often, POS can alert you to shifts in demand. If the POS demand changes or spot checks on low demand items point to a discrepancy you can bump that item to a higher priority and check more often.
Random cycle counts across hundreds of items is going to be pretty much impossible to evade for any period of time.
there are actually bars w/ those upside down pourer things? gasp As a raging alchoholic/college student, I don’t thinkI could ever drink at a bar with one of those. Half of the fun of going out to the bars is knowing which bartender pours stronger drinks, and which doesn’t, and watching them flip bottles and that kind of stuff. Measuring it all out would just take away from the experience.
As to inventory, I pretty much agree w/ the “it’s so cheap why bother”. At least that’s been the attitude in every restaruant I’ve worked in, granted, we were dealing w/ soda and not liquor.
It really depends upon what your in buisness to do.
If you are a restaurant your liquor is used to enhance your food sales.You make money with food and
try to at least break even with your bar.
Back when I was managing bars I would only worry about opened bottles at years end when doing a real inventory.
Otherwise I knew by watching my bartenders if they were over pouring.
Usually they were.
I used to count as I poured. 1 oz might have been a 4 count. 1 1/2oz a 6 count.Depends upon the pourer. And the
thickness of the liqueur
I liked the metal pourers best.
Stronger drinks don’t necessarily make them better.
You can put on a pretty good show while using a shot glass.
Here in Iowa we had to break empty liquor bottles but the empty bottles were kept and counted.
You’d be surprised at how constant the amount of liquor in opened bottles stays day to day.
That last comment should read … the total amount of liquor in opened bottles…