What Happens to Your Stock Control When the Team Changes

Staff turnover has costs everyone puts on a spreadsheet: recruitment, training, uniforms, management time, and the weeks before somebody new is fully useful.

Here is one that never makes the spreadsheet. When an experienced person leaves, the way your stock is controlled leaves with them.

Most stock control lives in people's heads

Not in a manual. In the head of whoever has been checking the deliveries for three years.

They know that the Tuesday drop is always one crate short until you ring them. They know which button to press for a double and which one somebody set up wrong in 2023. They know the batch recipe is written for six litres but everybody makes four. They know to write the breakage down rather than mention it later.

Their replacement may be better at the job and will still not know any of that for a month.

What it looks like in the numbers

Rarely a cliff. Usually a drift: variance widening slightly, waste recorded less consistently, stock creeping up because ordering has gone cautious, a margin that softens without any single explanation.

The useful question is not whether the new team is any good. It is whether the change in the numbers lines up with the change in the people — because if it does, you are looking at a handover problem, which is fixable, rather than a performance problem, which is a different and much less comfortable conversation.

A change of operator is the same problem with a date on it

When a site changes hands, everything above happens at once — and there is money attached to it.

A stocktake on the day establishes what is physically there and what it is worth. It gives the outgoing operator a defensible figure and the incoming one a baseline to be measured from. Nobody inherits an argument about what was in the cellar, because somebody counted it.

That is not about suspicion. It is about both sides starting from the same number.

Processes outlast people

The answer to turnover is not recruiting people who already know your systems, because they do not exist. It is having systems that survive the handover: recipes written down, measures agreed, waste recorded as routine rather than confession, EPOS that matches what is actually sold, and a stocktake history that shows the next person what normal looks like here.

Hospitality is a people business and people move on. The information should not move with them.

If you are taking a site on — or handing one over — the stocktake worth having is the one on the day. It takes a few hours and it settles the question permanently. We do a lot of them, usually at short notice, and the only thing we would ask is as much warning as you can give.

Hospitality Counts.