Today I would like to talk to you about how often you should have a stock take carried out.

Ideally if you follow the guidelines that the institute of trade stockholders have set out, ideally it would be on a monthly basis. 

Especially if you’ve got a high volume business, that might be high volume on the wet side, it might be a high volume food outlet, or it might be a combination of the both. 

It very much depends on your turnover. 

High turnover means there’s more chance of things going wrong, more chance of you losing money just because you haven’t spotted a price increase.

For example recently on the east coast, I’d asked a question, lets phone their BDM, they were tenants, I went there a few weeks later to do the next one and they told me from the question I’d asked, they’d actually got back a £12,000 trade credit because it turned out that they had been overcharged. 

They hadn’t noticed it.

It wasn’t obvious on the invoice.

But if they’d left that any length of time and it had not been noticed, then they would have been struggling come the winter.

I run a traffic light system for a lot of my clients, so they tend to be smaller sites. 

I recognise that money is often tight, so if they have several good stocktakes, I will push them out from monthly to maybe six weekly to two monthly to quarterly. 

I tend not to go over a quarterly stock take, because I think if you go over that, if you’re asking questions to staff and to clients, then there’s more likely to be things that they’ve maybe forgotten to tell you. If you’ve got a query on something, then the chances are them remembering anything over three months about what happened is remote. 

So three months it’s about the maximum I go to and they tend to be for lower volume outlets, might be some clubs, members clubs tend to go quarterly and I’ve got a couple of golf courses that go quarterly and a few very small pubs. 

But higher your volume, the more often you should have it done because you need to be on top of anything that’s gone awry. 

So it might be that we identify that you need to train your staff how to pour beer better, how to use a till better, if you’ve left that six months, then that potentially is a lot of money you could have lost in a high volume business. 

It’s also if staff have got lacks and recording allowances, again in six months time that could be a loss is a lot bigger than it would be if you got quarterly stocktakes. 

If you’ve gone losses, if we’re doing monthly ones, we can show a pattern of that getting tighter, getting you back to equilibrium and therefore a more profitable business. 

So in summary, how often should I have my stocktake done?

It very much depends on the type of business you’ve got and how well your stocktakes are going.