Today I want to talk about the difference between food stocktaking, sometimes known as dry stocktaking and wet stocktaking.

Let’s start with wet stocktaking.

Wet stocktaking is as it suggests, it’s all your wet stock, it’s everything that comes through the bar, so that includes;
Spirits
Bottle beers
Soft drinks
Draft beers
Lagers
Wine

But we also include in that;
Bar snacks
Chocolate
Crisps
Nuts
And all those sort of things.

With wet stocktaking we produce a fully extended report, so it shows line by line what you paid, what you’d pay for that at cost price, what your opening position was, what you purchased, any credits going back, your closing stock, your selling price, your average day stock holding, your gross profit for that line and your average sales.

It then takes that down through section by section, it summarises by section, so you’ll have a section for draft beer, bottle beer, minerals, spirits, liqueurs, vermouth, fortified wine, wine and then snacks.

So you can see line by line, item by item, exactly what money you’re making on each item, and how much you’ve sold.

Dry Stocktaking

Whereas food stocktaking we produce a trading account, because you might buy in 10 kilos of mince and you might use some for lasagne, some for chile, say. Or you’re buying in large jars of pepper, which you are gonna use a little bit in this dish, a little bit in that dish, so it has to be a trading account.

So what does that mean?

That means we count all your stock, we put all your purchases on a list, so that we can value that accurately we take away any credits you’ve got.

We’ve got an opening and a closing stock, so we can tell you exactly what gross profit you’ve made, because you’ve given us your income. It means you can measure what you’ve made, gross profit wise against your target, if there’s a variance we can look at that and decide whether it’s a buying issue, it’s a theft issue, or it is a pricing issue.

When we sit down with both the wet and the food at the end of a stocktake and discuss it with you, so you can make informed decisions in your business to push your business forward.