Bar Inventory Count Sheet
Back BarWhat poured, what it cost, and what to order back to par.
The count takes two hours on a Sunday night and produces a spreadsheet nobody trusts by Wednesday. The till knows what was sold; it does not know the well is a 1.75 and the call is a 750, or what you keep back-ups of.
The Sunday-night count, worked out instead of guessed. What was on the shelf, what came in, what is left — so what poured, what it cost against the week you actually rang, and what to order back up to the pars you set. It flags a count that cannot be true rather than quietly turning it into a number.
About this tool
Bar Inventory Count Sheet: what it solves
A bar’s inventory is not one number, it is a shelf. The Bar Inventory Count Sheet takes an opening count, whatever came in, and a closing count, and works out what actually poured — then prices it at the costs you enter and divides it by the sales you rang, per kind, because liquor, beer and wine move differently and one blended figure hides whichever one moved. It orders back to the pars you set, rounded up, because nobody orders part of a bottle. Counts are kept in half-units and money in whole cents, so a shelf of a hundred lines does not drift. It refuses to tell you what a pour cost should be or what to set a par at, and it will not compare what you used against what you theoretically should have — that needs a recipe and a pour size for every drink you make, and guessing them prints a confident number with nothing under it.
One pour cost hides whichever thing moved
A bar that reports a single pour cost is averaging three businesses together.
Liquor, beer and wine do not behave alike. They are bought differently, they spoil differently, they get given away differently, and they move at different speeds. Blend them into one percentage and a liquor problem is cushioned by a good beer month, or a beer problem disappears behind wine that barely moved.
This counts each kind against the sales you actually rang for that kind. Three numbers, not one. The week a number moves, you know which shelf to go and look at.
What poured is a subtraction, not an estimate
Opening count, plus what came in, minus closing count. That is what left the building.
It is a subtraction and this keeps it a subtraction. There is no model in here, nothing is smoothed, and no line is adjusted toward what it usually does. If the number is strange, the number is strange and you go and look — which is the only thing that has ever found a real problem behind a bar.
Counts are held in half-units and money in whole cents, so a shelf of a hundred lines does not drift a few cents at a time into a figure nobody trusts.
The one thing it refuses to calculate, and why
It will not compare what you used against what you theoretically should have used.
That comparison is the headline feature of every bar inventory product sold, and it needs two things you do not have: a recipe for every drink you make, and a real pour size for every one of them — not the one on the spec card, the one your bartenders actually pour on a Friday at eleven.
Without those, the variance number is arithmetic on a guess. It looks precise, it is quotable, and it sends people to have conversations with staff about a figure that was invented. This sheet does not print it, because a confident wrong number is worse than a blank space.
What it will tell you is what left, what it cost, and what that came to against what you rang. Those are all subtractions on things you counted.
Par is yours, and the order rounds up
The reorder is against the pars you set, and it rounds up, because nobody has ever ordered two thirds of a bottle.
What a par should be is not a question with an answer that lives outside your bar. It depends on your delivery days, your storage, your cash position and what you are unwilling to run out of on a Saturday. This sheet applies the pars you set. It does not suggest them, and it does not drift them based on last month.
What it replaces
The clipboard count that gets typed into a spreadsheet the next day, sometimes. Or the count that happens every third week because the full one takes four hours and there is never a four-hour gap.
You set your shelf, your costs and your pars once. Every count after that is walking the bar with a tablet and reading the answer at the end of it.
Who it is for
Bars, restaurants, breweries and taprooms — anywhere the shelf is worth enough that what leaves it untracked matters, and where the pars and the costs were set by the person who buys.
What it will not do
It will not tell you what a pour cost should be. There is no number here to hand you. What yours ought to be depends on what you pour, what you charge and what kind of room you are running.
It will not set a par. See above. That is a decision about your own risk on a Saturday night.
It will not compare you to anybody. No survey figures, no category averages, nothing from anywhere but your own counts.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser. Your costs and your volumes are commercially yours, and they stay on the machine you counted on. Close the tab and it is gone.
Yours would be built the same way.
This one runs on made-up data. The version built for your business runs on yours, and you own it outright. Builds start at $1,300. That is a floor, not a quote. What yours costs is agreed before any work begins. The first conversation is free.