Do I need to tell my stocktaker if I’m running promotions in my venue? 

The quick and easy answer is yes.

As stocktakers will need to make an allowance or maybe even a surcharge for these discounts. 

It’s not exactly a promotion, but where you sell wine by the glass and the bottle, it’s usual that the the combined revenue for say three 250ml glasses of wine will be more than selling the bottle as one full bottle, so we need to do that because that will make your income will be artificially high depending on how the stock taker has set up his system. 

If your stocktaker is counting it by price per bottle, then you’ll have to put a surcharge through. 

The types of promotions we need to know are anything, some examples are; 

One of the usual ones is where you’re doing ‘double up’ for say £1.50 so you’re getting two spirits, you get a double spirit from say one and a half times rather than twice the usual selling price of a single.

It could be two for ones. 

It could be pitchers of ale which I’ve seen especially in some rugby clubs, they’re quite good at that or sports clubs, they will do some four pint pitchers cheaper than selling four individual pints. 

Quite often there might be promotions on bottle beers, again get five for a tenner or whatever, where the actual selling price is less than you would have selling those bottles individually. 

As a stock taker we would probably have put it in so that our expected yield for bottled beer will be a price so it might be £4.50 per bottle, so if you’re selling some at effectively discounted rate, we need to know about it because it’s not always obvious on the tills, and if you tell us then we can make sure we’re trying to spot that. 

We’re very good at looking around for posters that are advertising special deals, but keep a record, tell us, we’d rather have more information from management of a venue than no information. 

Too much we can ignore what we don’t need to know, rather than having to keep getting it out. 

If you can, present it to your stocktaker with all your financial information right at the beginning, then he or she’s not having to keep finding you during the day to ask you questions so you can then concentrate on serving your customers, looking after your staff, doing training, whatever you’ve got to do during the day, ready for putting that half an hour aside at the end of the stocktake when your stocktaker has got a result and can then go through it with you and we chat about it and make recommendations on how to increase your profit.