Straight answers to the questions operators actually ask before working with Clarity by David Holden, an F&B profit recovery and stock audit consultancy based in the Midlands, working with restaurants, pubs, and hotels across the UK.

£50,000 a week came through one loading bay. Two deliveries of drink, the rest food, roughly a third beverage to two-thirds food. Two goods receivers on it full time, a third just for busy days. Industrial scales built into the bay itself. Nothing got signed until it was weighed. Every delivery, checked against what was actually being paid for. When a shortage turned up, it wasn’t logged and forgotten, it was phoned through to the supplier that same day, credit reques

“Oh, that must still be on the lorry.” Twenty-fifth floor. A restaurant that only takes deliveries by lift - pallet up first, then kegs on two-wheel sack trucks, one trip at a time. A keg short on the delivery. The driver’s answer: must still be downstairs.

The GM was watching. She’d done it enough times to know the rhythm - full one way, empty the other. So when a keg came out and she knew there hadn’t been an empty one to return, she stopped and looked properly. A full Guinness, dressed up as an empty. Wheeled out under a legitimate empty stacked on top, banking on nobody looking twice. She looked twice.

A stock loss isn't a mystery. It's a blue light flashing. And that blue light is almost always telling you one of three things: something is being lost, something is being missed, or something is being taken. In my experience, persistent variances aren't random. They repeat because the cause hasn't been identified and, consequently, hasn't been addressed.

Every cardboard box on that delivery isn't just a cardboard box. Treat it like an envelope stuffed with £50 notes, because that's exactly what it is. That's the mindset shift that separates sites that control their stock from sites that wonder where the money went.

You run the stocktake. The numbers don't match. There's a gap between what the stock should be and what's actually on the shelf — and there it is again, the same as last month, and the month before that. Most operators have learned to live with it. A bit of variance is "normal." It gets written off as shrinkage, wastage, the cost of running a busy bar.