How Wet And Dry Gross Margins Affect Your Pub's Profit

Beer, spirits, wine, soft drinks, food and coffee all carry different profit margins. Many pub owners know their total turnover but have no clear idea which parts of the business actually make money. We break this down so you can see gross profit by category, not one blended number for the whole business.

How We Help Reduce Stock Losses And Till Discrepancies

Stock control is one of the biggest factors in pub profitability, and pub accountants should understand wet and dry stock management from day one. We compare theoretical gross profit against what actually landed in the till, looking at things like:

• stocktakes and cellar losses
• wastage, spillage and overpouring
• complimentary drinks and till discrepancies

Small gaps here add up fast across a busy bar, week after week, and accurate financial records, including tips and till reconciliations, are the only way to catch them early.

How We Help You See Which Dishes Actually Make Money

For food-led pubs, menu pricing matters as much as sales volume. We help with recipe costing, portion costs, and supplier price increases, so you know the gross profit on each dish rather than just your total food sales. This turns your menu into a profit tool instead of a guess.

Pub payroll is unusually complicated. Opening hours are long, staffing needs change by the day, and many hospitality venues rely on part-time employees and zero-hours contracts to cover peaks in trade. Add National Insurance, holiday pay and minimum wage changes, and payroll quickly becomes a job on its own.

Licensed trade businesses often have high staff turnover too, which means new starters and leavers need processing regularly. We also help manage tips and tronc schemes fairly across your employees, so front of house and kitchen staff both see a clear, correctly taxed share. We manage payroll, so your rota reflects the sales you are actually doing, not just habit.

How We Handle Due Diligence Before You Buy A Pub

Buying a pub without proper checks is a fast way to inherit someone else's problems. We look at historical turnover, sustainable profit, stock valuation, supplier debts, payroll liabilities, and whether the asking price actually stacks up against the numbers, then help you build realistic business plans before you commit.

How We Support You If You Are Growing A Pub Group Or Adding Rooms

If you run more than one site, or you have added accommodation alongside the bar, you are effectively running several businesses under one roof. We separate site-by-site profitability, rooms income, and food and drink sales, so you can see which parts of the business are pulling their weight.

We are a leading provider of pub accounting services because our team focuses almost entirely on hospitality businesses, from single site pubs to growing pub groups. As an experienced accountancy firm, our specialist accountants and specialised accountants for VAT benchmark your wet gross profit, food gross profit, and labour costs against similar venues, so you get actionable insights and tax planning advice rather than just a set of accounts once a year.

Clients benefit from working with an experienced pub accountant who already understands licensing laws, VAT complexities, and the reality of running licensed premises. We are proud to support the hospitality sector, and every financial decision we help you make is built around your actual financial year, not a generic assumption. Many of our clients tell us they finally understand their own numbers once we get involved. We also connect your till and card transaction data directly into your accounts, which cuts down manual bookkeeping and protects your profit margins by giving you a clearer picture of yesterday's trading.

Every pub is different, so our services and advice are built around your business rather than pulled from a template. That is what tailored services and tailored advice should actually mean, and it is how our team prefers to work with clients across the trade. We usually start with an initial consultation, so our team understands your business before anything is quoted or promised. We work with pubs, bars and restaurants of every size, from single-site locals to multi-site groups, and from day-to-day bookkeeping to specialist tax services; our services are built for pubs, not adapted from a generic small business package.