You could have £1,300 of your own cash sitting on a shelf right now, gathering dust. Try it on your own numbers — you might not like what you find.

A waiter gets fed by the kitchen. What the chefs get back doesn't show up as a wage, a tip, or a till transaction. It shows up in your post-mix deficiency instead.

A Guinness keg regularly yields over 100% on a stocktake report — and that's not a red flag, it's good control. Here's the target yield for every category, and the physical reason behind each one.

Most operators are handed a stocktake report every month and told a number. Few are ever shown how that number actually gets built, or what it's genuinely telling them. This is Part 1 of a four-part series on reading your own stocktake report properly, starting with the variance report itself, the foundation everything else in the series builds on.