Hospitality glossary · Money and margin
Stock variance is the difference between the gross profit your sales mix says you should have achieved and the gross profit an actual stocktake shows you made.
In practice
Definitions are easy. What matters is how the thing behaves in a real operation, and where it tends to go wrong.
The theoretical figure comes from your recipes and prices; the actual comes from counting what is physically there. The gap is real money and it has four ordinary causes before it has a dishonest one: over-portioning, wastage and breakage, unrecorded staff drinks or meals, and till errors such as items rung through at the wrong price. On wet stock, free-pouring instead of measuring accounts for more variance in most pubs than anything else.
Treating any variance as theft. Starting there poisons a team and usually hides the real cause, which is generally that nobody has been shown what a portion is meant to look like. Measure, then train, and only then investigate — in that order.
Questions
Something here that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own business? That is usually worth a conversation rather than another article.
Stock variance is the difference between the gross profit your sales mix says you should have achieved and the gross profit an actual stocktake shows you made. The theoretical figure comes from your recipes and prices; the actual comes from counting what is physically there. The gap is real money and it has four ordinary causes before it has a dishonest one: over-portioning, wastage and breakage, unrecorded staff drinks or meals, and till errors such as items rung through at the wrong price. On wet stock, free-pouring instead of measuring accounts for more variance in most pubs than anything else.
Treating any variance as theft. Starting there poisons a team and usually hides the real cause, which is generally that nobody has been shown what a portion is meant to look like. Measure, then train, and only then investigate — in that order.
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