Today I want to talk to you about the main reasons for stock taking. 

• Many people think it is just a an exercise of bottle counting….
• It’s there to check up on the staff…
• It’s there to catch the staff who are being dishonest…

Yes we are there for that, but really;

It’s a profit improvement exercise! 

‘Well we get management accounts from our accountant.’ – Yes you do. That shows your GP, but that shows you the GP you’ve actually achieved, it doesn’t show you what you could have achieved! 

If you have a fully extended stock take, we are able to show you, yes what you’ve achieved for the GP, which should be near enough the same figure that your accountant has come up with. (Providing it’s the same period). 

But we can also show what, your potential was, and why you haven’t reached that. 

• It could be that you’ve got staff training issues. 
• They are using the till incorrectly. 
• They they’re ringing through premium lagers as standard lagers
• Premium gins as standard gins. 

We can pick that up through doing a reconciliation. 

We can sit there and go through your pricing. 

I’ve had a client recently, where I queried the pricing of some of their beers. When I went there the following time they’d actually spoken to their brewer.  Yes there was an error and they had actually now got a trade credit of twelve and a half grand! 

Would the accountant have picked that up? 

Don’t know – Because the the invoice is being correct!

 I just knew from what they had said to me, that I didn’t think that that was necessarily the correct pricing they’d got. So I just asked the question, and then they got to twelve and a half grand back. 

We also look, and we also have an idea of what other people are buying stuff for. So we can advise through a stock take, looking at it individually items, whether you’re buying it at the best price you can. 

The accountant might come with a slightly different GP because you might be getting a retro deal, which we don’t deal with. We only deal with the cost prices, that are on the invoice. 

If you’ve got some sort of retro deal, we don’t deal with that. 

Your accountant would. That is why GPs might be awry.

We’ve also had occasions where accountants haven’t – with COVID and everything, when there were so many changes in VAT in hospitality. They hadn’t adjusted their VAT rates. 

So we were given a true rate, whereas the GP of theirs was out a bit.

So it’s very much, not so much ‘catching staff at it’ – That is important, but it is very much more now geared around sitting down with the client going through the report and finding ways that we can increase the profitability through better pricing better buying etc