Shaun McManus, licensee at Teal Farm Pub in Washington and founder of StockTap, said the tool was created after he struggled to find a simple way to check his own numbers behind the bar.
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McManus, who has run Teal Farm Pub for four years and worked in pubs for 19 years, said the idea followed “five stock audits in eight months”, including one that resulted in a £755 chargeback he disputed.
He told The Morning Advertiser (MA): “Every time I needed a number, what’s my GP% (gross profit) actually, what’s this gap costing me, I couldn’t find anywhere that would just do the sum. So I built it behind the bar.”
Profit gap
The pub GP and profit-leak calculator allows operators to enter a selling price and cost price to calculate GP, with VAT removed first.
Operators can then enter weekly wet sales, current GP and target GP to see what the gap could be worth over a year.
McManus said one of the most common mistakes licensees made was assuming they knew their GP.
He added: “The same pint can come out at 64.9% or 70.8% depending on whether the VAT’s been taken out of the sum, and half the arguments licensees have with their stocktaker are really two people using different formulas.
“After that, reading the bank balance as profit, and only finding out at year-end what the year actually did.”
The tool does not include a labour module, with McManus clarifying it is focused on GP and margin calculations.
Weekly checks
McManus said the calculator was aimed mainly at wet-led independents and tied tenants, but could be used by any operator who knew their selling price and cost price.
He said: “A two-point GP gap on a normal wet-led pub is thousands a year, and it’s invisible until someone puts a pound sign on it.”
The calculator is free to use and does not require sign-up or email capture, although it sits on the same site as McManus’ StockTap stocktaking app.
The calculator can be found here.
