Today I would like to talk to you about how long does a stocktake, take?

My initial reaction to that question is how long is a piece of string?

It depends on many factors. 

It depends how much stockholding you have.

I would suggest that somewhere that we’ve gone into that’s setting up a big festival was going to have a lot more stock that The Village Pub, however, if it’s all palletised, it’s all full kegs, it might not take as long.

So there’s a physical time with counting the stock.

How many bars do you have?

How big is your site?

Recently I was at race course and they’ve got bars all over the place, so you were looking at a couple of hours just walking between bars, overall.

So there’s that. 

And then you’ve got the physical paperwork.

How do we get presented with that? 

If you just give us a pile of paperwork that we’ve got to sort out, and match invoices to delivery notes that’s going to take longer time.

As most venues now seem to get their main suppliers invoices by email, we encourage you, our clients to email them as they receive them.

Most email systems you can setup automatic forwarding for this.

This means that on the day less time is spent on site.

It doesn’t take us as stocktakers any less time but we can put the paperwork on our system before we get to the venue.

So it means you’re not tied up all day, waiting for us to finish before we can go through and  talk about the stock take.

It also depends how often we get disturbed during the day, with questions.

It’s best to keep a diary with the events that you think that are relevant to the stock taker and present us with that at the beginning so that we’re then not going to stop what we’re doing because you’ve brought something else over or we have to go and appoint a member of staff  to find missing paperwork.

So how long it takes to do a stock take is very much dependent on size of venue,  the amount of stockholding and how the paperwork is presented to us and how much detail you  want to get at the end.

I would suggest that you allow yourself at least 30 minutes once we’re finished to sit down with your stock taker so you can go through the results, and sit with them and find ways forward to improve your business.