How long does a stock take last? 

That can be taken a couple of ways. 

That could mean how long does it actually physically take from getting to sites and doing a result, I mean that will just just depend on the size of the venue and the state of the paperwork etc that’s presented to us as stock takers. 

The other way you could look at it is how long an interval between stock takes, the maximum one would be a year, but that’s not really producing a stock take, that is just doing a valuation for a client of their stock for their accounts. 

The maximum we would normally recommend would be three months, but again it would depend on the volume of business that a venue has, a little country pub wet only sort of doing I don’t know three grand a week, it’s probably would get away with quarterly stock takes.

But if you’re a nightclub or a high volume wetland pub on the coast in a tourist area, you would probably want to bring that down to a month. That way you know exactly where your business is each month, you can look at your figures, it will often bring up um training needs, if the allowances have gone way up then have you got a problem?

I was with a client this week, it was only a pub but because we just started stock taking with them the the owner actually went through the allowance book and he identified, because he added it up and looked at it, he identified there was one member of staff that had a lot more waste on real ales on their shifts than any of the other members of staff, so that identified a training need, it’s probably the usual thing with that, they’re trying to pull a pint far too fast. So you’ve got that to consider.

The other way we do it is we work with the traffic light system, so if you have a couple of monthly stock takes and they’re fine, we can push it out to two months, if they’re still fine push it out of three months, if you have a bad stock take we can always bring it in again. 

So the length of time between stock takes relies on the results, the stock come out with and also the volume of business through that unit, the higher the volume the more often the stock takes need to be done, simply because a swing of one or two percent is going to make a lot more difference on sort of somewhere turning over £20-30,000 a week than somewhere turning over to £2-3,000 a week. 

So when you’re talking to your stock taker, just ascertain what they think your length of period should be and he will need to ask you lots of questions to come up with that figure. 

But keep to that because it’s a good way of making sure your business is running to its optimum, which is not just about the bottom line surface of deficit, it’s also about are you maximising the gross profit per item and overall.