Using your Pub EPOS to improve your gross profit

Frankie Neale • 20 June 2018

One of the many advantages of using a modern pub EPOS system is you can track your most important figures easily. One of the most important of these is your gross profit (GP).

By tracking your GP closely you can identify ways to improve it, which will feed directly through to your profits.

A good pub focused EPOS should allow you to see your GP on three levels.

Product GP

This is the GP you make on the sale of each product. When you set your prices on your EPOS back office you should be able to see the GP you will be making on each item. Checking this as you update your prices is the first step in ensuring you are making enough margin on each sale.

For food or cocktails that have recipes, it’s useful if your system has the ability to calculate the recipe cost automatically. If it doesn’t you should calculate the cost yourself so you can enter it into your system and make sure you know the GP you are making on those items.

EPOS product recipe set up, calculating GP

Theoretical GP

This is the GP you should have made on your sales, based on the product GP for all the products you have sold. You should be able to see on your EPOS reports what your theoretical GP was for any period. This provides your target GP for those sales. This may not be the same as the actual GP you made, and this is where the final check comes in.

Actual GP

This is the GP you actually made based on the stock that you have gone through over the period. You will see this figure on your stock report when you run a stock take. This should ideally be as close as possible to your theoretical GP, but due to wastage or unexplained variances is likely to be different.

Improving Your GP

Tracking GP on all 3 levels will identify options to improve on it. Increasing your prices or driving down your cost prices will improve your product level GP. Any improvements here will feed straight through to your theoretical GP. Any difference between your theoretical and actual GP can be then be minimised through reducing wastage or investigating any unexplained variances.

To see how our Pub EPOS can help you track and improve your GP contact one of our team.

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How to make sure your venue is ready for Christmas

by Matt Hall • 10 September 2025

There’s no such thing as ‘too early to think about Christmas’ when you work in hospitality. And after a bruising year that’s brought major challenges for the industry, December is more important than ever for many businesses. When it comes to crafting the perfect festive atmosphere, you’re the experts there – we’re simply here to show you how getting things like your tech systems, menus, staffing, and gift cards sorted now, means you’ll make the most of Christmas and manage your venue more effectively. Optimise your offerings and boost profit margins No doubt you’ll want to capture the spirit of the season with a festive menu. Roast meats and Christmas puddings are a must, but don’t forget a vegan option too. Whatever you choose, make sure your dishes balance popularity and profitability. Recipe management tools let you input ingredient costs and amounts, so you get precise costs for every item on your menu. It then automatically calculates GP so you can easily set the right prices both for individual items and festive set menus. This works really well for food, but also for cocktails, and festive drinks you might make on-site, such as mulled wine or cider. Using technology to manage bookings When it comes to Christmas bookings, balance is key. You want more bums on seats, but you don’t want to overwhelm your kitchen and Front-of-House staff – especially when bookings around Christmas tend to be larger. A flexible booking system helps you maintain control. Those office Christmas lunches often have ten or twenty guests, so it helps to keep them separate from your usual bookings. Asking for pre-orders and prepayments makes it much easier to manage those big complicated bookings. Email links go out to organisers so everything can be booked and paid for in advance. This guarantees your cash flow ahead of time and means your kitchen can prepare and ensure the right amount of stock. You can also create custom drink packages to upsell during the booking process.