Getting pour cost under control
Theoretical pour cost says what you should have used. Actual says what you did. The gap is free pouring, comps, breakage and recipe drift — and it is measurable.
Pour cost is the headline efficiency number behind a bar, and it is unusually diagnostic: unlike food, drinks are made from a small number of measurable ingredients in repeatable quantities. That means the gap between what your recipes say you should have used and what your stock says you actually used is a real, attributable number rather than a rounding artefact.
Theoretical minus actual is the whole exercise
Theoretical pour cost comes from your recipes multiplied by what you sold. Actual comes from counting: opening stock, plus purchases, minus closing stock. Each on its own is only mildly interesting. The difference between them is where the money went.
Without both numbers you are guessing, and a bar that only knows its actual cost can never tell whether a bad month was over-pouring, a price rise, or simply a shift in what people ordered.
The four causes, in roughly the order to check them
- ✓Free pouring. The most common by a distance. Unmeasured pours drift upward under pressure, and a consistent drift across every drink is enormous over a month.
- ✓Unrecorded comps and staff drinks. Not dishonesty when they are policy — but a comp that is poured and never rung is invisible to the system and shows up only as variance.
- ✓Breakage and spillage. Real, and worth logging precisely so it stops being a mystery. Unlogged waste is indistinguishable from theft in the numbers.
- ✓Recipe drift. Your recipes say one measure; the house pour has quietly become something else. The recipe is then wrong, and every theoretical figure built on it is wrong too.
A variance spread evenly across every spirit points at pouring practice. A variance concentrated in two or three bottles points at those specific products — a comp habit, a breakage spot, or one drink whose recipe no longer matches reality.
Fixes that hold
- ✓Measure. Jiggers or measured pourers remove the largest cause outright, and the objection that it slows service is worth testing rather than accepting.
- ✓Ring every comp. If staff drinks are policy, they should be rung as comps so they appear as a cost you chose rather than a variance you cannot explain.
- ✓Log breakage at the moment it happens, with a name attached to nothing. Blame stops the logging, and the log is worth more than the accountability.
- ✓Re-cost recipes when suppliers move. A theoretical figure built on last year's prices is a fiction that will quietly excuse a real problem.
- ✓Count consistently. Same time, same order, same person where possible — an inconsistent count produces variance that is purely measurement error.
A note on happy hour
Discounted periods distort pour cost if you compare across them without adjusting, because the same liquid produced less revenue. Worth segmenting rather than averaging. It is also worth knowing that Opero does not change prices automatically at a set time — there is no scheduled happy-hour pricing today, so a discounted period is managed as a deliberate price or promotion change rather than a timer.
Where the numbers come from
The reason most bars do this once and stop is that assembling the inputs is laborious: sales by product from one place, recipes from a spreadsheet, counts from a clipboard. Opero holds recipe costing on the same spine as the orders, so theoretical usage comes from what actually sold rather than from an estimate of it.
Inventory and recipe costing are on the Growth plan and above.
See recipe costing against what actually sold.
Explore inventory and recipe costingFrequently asked questions
- What is a good pour cost?
- It varies by concept, by the spirits you carry and by how much of your volume is beer, wine or cocktails, so a single benchmark is less useful than your own trend. What matters more is the gap between theoretical and actual, which should be small and stable whatever your headline figure is.
- How often should we count?
- Frequently enough that a variance is still traceable to a period you can remember. Monthly is common; weekly on a small number of high-value bottles catches problems considerably sooner.
- Does Opero support happy-hour pricing on a schedule?
- No. Prices do not change automatically at a set time today, so a discounted period is handled as a deliberate price or promotion change rather than an automatic switch.
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