Why use an external stock taker? 

Great question, many till systems now come with stock taking modules, they sell it to you, “oh it can do your stock taking, it’s great.” 

That relies on a few things;

• That you are inputting or your staff are inputting your deliveries on the system.
• It relies on your staff counting accurately.
• Have you the means to count accurately? Can you or your staff tell what is in a keg of beer? 
• Are you stock checking regularly? 

It’s also worth considering whether the same member of staff is doing it all the time.

As happens quite often especially with food stock taking, some companies say to their chefs we need you to do a food stock take on a Sunday night, which is great, they have to do it before they go home, the weekend is the busiest time in any hospitality business, they are shattered, there’s a lack of staff at the moment, we all know about that, and the last thing they want to do is the stock. 

Is the chef going to do it or is he going to get the KP to do it? 

Is the KP going to know exactly what he’s looking at? 

Is he gonna know the weight of that thing? 

There’s all sortd of ways that they can do it. 

If you’ve got someone dishonest who let’s say has been taking a couple of steaks home, instead of there being 10 there should be 12, and he knows that are they going to put 12 down? 

It’s the same in the bar.

Are they going to count everything accurately? 

Is their sole purpose going to be getting an account done and putting it on the system? 

What else can they tell you? 

Probably nothing, they’re not trained. 

We will be looking at things like cell buy dates too. 

There are telltale signs of people perhaps being less honest, is there a sink full of slices of oranges and lemons? 

That’s one way of doing what they call counting, so they might be under ringing on the till and that’s a way of them knowing how much at the end of the night that you’ve got to take money out. 

All the POS systems that have stock taking modules on them, if you talk to the actual POS suppliers they will say that only ever gives you a theoretical stock holding for that business.

At some point you need to do a fiscal stocktake count, and if you have somebody independent, they can look with fresh eyes over the business, we will also say “yep we agree with that, but why are you only getting, why are you being charged that or why are you only getting that amount of GP on that item?” 

Your staff when they’re doing it at best all they’re going to do is be able to tell you stock variances and maybe your stock holding to go in some trading accounts to give you a rough GP. 

We look at it in far more detail and it will help you increase that GP.