Yes, we are all aware that taking your restaurants liquor inventory can be a headache and time consuming. However, we also know it’s a necessary way to really see what’s going on in your bar, especially when it comes to your liquor. Your liquor is the most valuable liquid in your bar (versus beer and wine) because per oz. it costs you the most. This is why you should be doing bar inventory spot checks on your bartenders. Only takes ten minutes and it will give you a world of information about your bartenders.
So today, I’m going to show you the best way to count your open liquor bottles, as well as the worst way to do it. Because if you’re doing it the worst way (hint: point-counting), your counts and cost percentage is going to be way off. That means you need to be able to count your liquor bottles fast and accurately so you can sleep better at night. This is key if you want to become a master at running a mega-successful bar and restaurant.
By the way, how’s it going? I’m Dave Allred TheRealBarman from Barpatrol.net and TheRealBarman.com. For those of you who don’t know me yet, when it comes to bar inventory, well, I’m sort of a big deal.
I’m just kidding of course. I drink my bourbon one sip at a time, just like you. But I have been in the bar industry for more than 30 years now, and I’ve been running Bar Patrol, my bar inventory business, for the past 11 years.
During that time, I’ve counted thousands of inventories myself and I’ve helped hundreds of bars master their inventory and lower their cost percentage by a large margin. One of the things people want to know most when it comes to bar inventory is how to count the open liquor bottles and get an accurate reading. Well, there are a couple options. Perhaps you already know about them, but let me show you just how important it is that you choose the correct method of counting when it comes to open liquor bottles.
We’re going to start with the most traditional method, dating back to the 9th century B.C. when squires and serfs were required to count the king’s inventory by means of point-counting to measure the amount of liquor in the bottle. Ok, maybe not 9th century B.C. but this is a seriously outdated method that has been used for a long time when it comes to liquor measurements. Let’s take a look at an example, starting with point-counting.
Let’s start with point-counting. As an example, let’s take a common brand bottle, Jack Daniel’s. We will add marks to see what you do when you point-count. Just for clarification, these are imaginary marks. They won’t be magically hovering next to your bottle like they are in the picture.
If you haven’t done point-counting before to do your liquor inventory, you are basically guessing how much is in the bottle based on increments of tenths. So if you think the liquid level is about at the 0.6 level, then you will estimate it’s about 6/10 of a bottle. Ok, the problem is, your 6/10ths is different from my 6/10ths guess. I might put it at 7/10ths or something else. This leaves a 10-15% margin of error here, which is huge. OUCH!
Now, with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, it’s square, and pretty proportionately sized, but what about these bottles here:
The first, Don Julio 1942 is fat along the bottom and gets skinnier toward the top. How do you point-count that? How do you determine how much is in the bottle by just looking at it? And then we get these other bottles like Bailey’s or Clase Azul where you can’t even see the liquid line because they are opaque or completely solid. Since you can’t see, you end up shaking the bottle, which is about as accurate as guessing how many feet long an airplane is that you’re looking up at two miles high in the sky. You have no idea how much is in there, causing huge inaccuracies. This makes point-counting for liquor inventory virtually impossible.
Now, let’s do a math example to actually see how far off this method of taking alcohol inventory can be. This example will be for a conservative bar with conservative sales. The higher your sales get, the higher this number can be off.
Let’s say you have $12,000 in sitting liquor inventory in your restaurant or bar. That’s an accurate count if you were able to count 100% accurately. Let’s say we are going to multiply this by 12.5% margin of error. Half way between the 10% and 15% just on average. That means you will get a 12.5% margin of error point-counting conservatively, which means you are going to be $1,500 off in that inventory:
Now, in order to get our cost percentage, we need a beginning and ending inventory and we need to figure out the usage in between. This means we need two inventory counts, a beginning inventory and an ending inventory. That means you could be $1,500 off on the first one and you could be $1,500 on the second one, resulting in a $3,000 discrepancy. But again, we’ll be conservative because you might not be off that much on each, so we can go ahead and shrink those numbers a little bit and say that your usage is more like $2,500 off between the two inventories.
To figure your cost percentage, like I just said, you need your usage and you then you have to divide it by your total sales for that time period. Whether it’s the week, the month, the year, whatever you are doing. Let’s take our example here again:
In this example, we take $12,000 and divide it by $60,000 for the sales in the month you have a 20% pour cost percentage. You are thinking, ok, that’s great. But if you have a margin of error and your usage is $2,500 off, that puts you at $14,000 in sitting inventory. Suddenly your cost percentage is 24.16%. When your counting is off by that much, suddenly your cost percentage is off by 4%!!!. And if you’re inexperienced and don’t know…that’s A LOT.
That’s what point-counting gets you, and yet you may have never really thought about it. You’re just counting along. You didn’t think about how harmful it is to your profit/loss statement, but it is. And when you get right down to it, point counting is mentally exhausting. When you have to constantly estimate, “Is that 0.2 or 0.3? 0.27?” Bottle after bottle. It’s really tough.
This is exactly why other bar inventory apps that just claim to do quick inventory, such as Partender App are still not accurate. It’s a guessing game of how much alcohol is in the bottle.
Weigh Liquor Bottles With this method, you’ll need a scale capable of measuring small increments accurately. Start by weighing an empty bottle of the same type and size. Then, weigh each full bottle individually, subtracting the empty bottle’s weight to obtain the liquor’s weight.
Counting Liquor Inventory by Weight
So now, let’s look at the most accurate method of counting your liquor inventory which is to weigh the bottles to determine exactly how much liquid is left in the bottle. This is exactly what we do with Bar Patrol Inventory App and our awesome Bluetooth scale.
What makes the the Bluetooth scale so effective is that it has a narrow 1 – 2% margin of error, and that margin of error is mostly because when the bottles are manufactured, the amount of glass they use can vary by an oz. or two. Besides that, it is dead-on accurate. And super sleek and sexy, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Now, you might be asking a couple of questions right now.
- How does the scale know how much is left in the bottle when different bottles weigh differently, and
- How does the scale know which bottle is on the scale?
The answer to #1 is that we have a product database inside of Bar Patrol of more than 27,000 products and many of those are liquor bottles. For those liquor bottles, we have the full and empty bottle weights for the most popular brands out there. Now, we don’t have every brand. They keep popping up with more and more these days, and the liquor bottle tare weight list we have is one I created myself from the thousands of inventories I have taken here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
But even if you have liquor brands not on our list, there is an easy formula we show you how to do to determine the full and empty weight. You just weigh a new bottle to get the full weight and subtract the liquid weight and voila, you’ve got the full and empty weight of the bottle. Very Simple.
The answer to #2 is that when you use Bar Patrol App, you will create a memory blueprint inside the app by entering all of your beer, liquor and wine products in the same order that they appear on your shelves, in your storage room, walk-in cooler, the rails, etc. etc. From there on out, every time you count your bar inventory, all of your products will pop up in the exact same order every time, matching app to shelf, so you’re able to fly through your inventory.
Does Bar Patrol Have a Liquor Scanner?
Some people ask me if we have a liquor inventory scanner. The answer is a definite no. I don’t like scanners. I’ve used scanners. It takes an extra step to line up the infra-red light with the barcode so it actually takes longer and it is simply unnecessary.
So whatever liquor bottle pops up in the app, you put that on the Bluetooth scale and the weight pops right into the app and tells you how much is left in the bottle.
As you can see here, this is what it looks like when you are weighing your bottles. You are simply looking at the app which will tell you which bottle is next and needs to be put on to the scale. You hit enter, take it down and put the next one on.
If you take a look here, this is a screenshot of the app. This is an example of a bottle of Jameson that was weighed. The app automatically converts the weight in oz. to how much is left in the bottle.
Now, when you first weigh the bottle, as you’re taking inventory, it won’t show you this many digits. It just shows it to the hundredths place (i.e. 0.65), but if you go back into the inventory later and look at it, you can see how accurate the weighing is. It goes to 15 digits. Not even necessary to go that far, but it’s just the software doing extensive math. Again, no thinking or guestimating involved. You just put the bottle on the scale, hit enter and then the next bottle will appear and you grab it and put it on the scale and so on and so forth.
Now, let’s go back to our sitting inventory example and see the difference with our numbers with just that 1-2% margin of error.
If we look at this 1 to 2 percent margin of error and go through the formula again we can see the difference. Again, we have $12,000 of sitting liquor inventory and we take that little average like we did before in the previous example. So we are going to go 1.5% (halfway between 1 – 2%) and now we are only $225 off. HUGE difference. Remember after the two inventories, we aren’t going to go extreme, we are going to go smaller so we will say that we are $250 off in usage.
Reminder: Cost % = Usage divided by Total Sales. Same formula here. It should look like this:
Our perfect amount was that 20% pour cost and now with that smaller margin of error it looks like:
We are only off by 0.4%. 4/10ths of a percent. Let that sink in. This is all done by using Bar Patrol’s Bluetooth Inventory Scale.
Restaurant & Bar Inventory in 3 Easy Steps
FAQ
How do you measure liquor inventory?
How do you measure a bottle of liquor?
How do you use a liquor scale?
What is a liquor scale?
How do you weigh a liquor bottle?
The popular method of weighing liquor bottles is to manually take up every bottle, eyeball it and guess its bottle weight. But this is one of the most inaccurate methods of taking inventory. Not to mention frustrating and time-consuming! Liquor bottles have to be weighed twiceat the start of the inventory period, and again at the end of it.
How do you weigh a beer?
There are few things that you absolutely need to weigh your liquor and draft beer: 1) A digital scale that weighs in ounces for liquor and wine bottles. And/or a scale large enough for kegs which will typically weigh in pounds/ounces. 2) A calculator, pen, and paper. 3) The density (specific gravity) for each product that you will be weighing.
How to measure liquor stock for inventory?
The best way to keep track of your liquor stock is to weigh your liquor bottles. Weighing bottles is a way of measuring the amount of liquor used during an inventory period, by weighing a bar’s stock at the start and at the end of the inventory period. Why Bother Knowing How to Measure Liquor Bottles for Inventory?
How to measure liquor bottles for inventory?
Out of the five methods, weighing your liquor bottles proves to be the most exact and effective method for measuring your bottles for inventory. When you use software for weighing and measuring bottles for inventory, along with weighing, you get the most accurate inventory.