Par Levels and the Money Sitting in Your Store

Ask most operators how they order and the honest answer is: someone looks at the shelf on a Tuesday and guesses.

That works. It also has a price, and the price is invisible because it never appears as a line on any report.

What ordering by eye actually costs

Cash tied up      product on a shelf is money not in your account
Ageing            some of it will not sell before it should
Weekend stockouts the expensive kind, on the busiest night
Emergency buying  paying retail because you ran out
Storage           space, and the labour of moving things twice

The third line is the one people feel and the first line is the one that costs more. A venue carrying twice the stock it needs has quietly lent that money to its distributor, interest-free, for as long as the habit lasts.

A par level, stated properly

A par is not "how much we keep." It is:

Par = expected usage over the lead time
    + a buffer for how wrong that expectation gets

Two terms, and most rooms only think about the first one. The buffer is not padding — it is a deliberate answer to "how bad is a stockout of this specific item?"

A stockout of your headline spirit on Saturday is a different event from running out of a garnish. They should not carry the same buffer.

Setting one, from your own numbers

1  Pull usage per item, per week, for eight weeks
2  Take the median week, not the average
3  Multiply by the lead time in weeks, rounded up
4  Add a buffer sized by what a stockout of that item costs you
5  Write the number on the shelf where the item lives

Step two matters more than it looks. One exceptional week pulls the average up and you will carry that week's stock forever. The median is what a normal week actually uses.

Step five is not decoration. A par level that lives in a spreadsheet gets ignored; one written where the person doing the count is standing gets used.

The three lines that say your pars are wrong

Stockouts on a normal night      buffer too small, or lead time understated
Product ageing out               par too high, or the item should not be listed
Order size swinging wildly       you are ordering by eye, not by par

The third is the diagnostic. If orders for the same item swing by large multiples week to week with no matching swing in sales, the par is not being used — whatever is written on the shelf.

Lead time is not what your rep says

What the rep says       the optimistic number
What you measure        order placed → product on your shelf
Friday orders           frequently a Monday delivery, which is four days
Holiday weeks           always longer, and always forgotten

Measure it yourself for a month. The gap between the stated lead time and the real one is where most stockouts live, and it is a gap you can close with a calendar rather than more stock.

⚠️ Do not raise every par at once after one bad weekend. You will convert a stockout problem into a working-capital problem, and the second one is harder to see.

Items that should not have a par

Some things should be ordered to order:

Items that sell fewer than a handful a month
Anything with a short shelf life and lumpy demand
Bottles held for one specific guest
Seasonal items outside their season

A par level on a slow item is just a decision to own it for a long time. Order those on demand and accept the occasional wait.

The count itself

A par is useless without a count, and a count is useless if it is not the same count every time.

Same day, same time, same person where possible
Same unit — bottles, not "about half"
Written down, not remembered
Compared against sales, so shrinkage is visible

The last line connects this to a different problem: if your counts and your sales disagree consistently, that is not an ordering issue. → Stock Shrinkage Behind the Bar

The number worth computing once

Days of stock = value of inventory on hand ÷ average daily cost of sales

Compute it once and it will probably surprise you. There is no universal right answer — a room with weekly deliveries and one with monthly deliveries should look completely different — but the number tells you how much of your cash is sitting on shelves rather than working.

Then ask the only question that matters: if that money were in the account instead, what would you do with it? If the answer is "nothing in particular", your stock level is fine. If the answer is a specific thing, you have found the cost.

The system we built

tasteck is a booking and analytics system for night venues, built by people who ran them for sixteen years and grew from ¥200 million to ¥1.2 billion a year — six-fold, by attacking the business with systems rather than by pushing harder on sales.

What it does here, honestly: tasteck is not an inventory system and does not hold stock counts, par levels or purchase orders. What it supplies is the demand side — settlement broken out by line, so what actually sold is separable by item rather than buried in a total; bookings by weekday and hour, so usage can be read against the shape of the week rather than a flat average; and period comparison, so this month sits next to the same month before.

Pair it with whatever you count stock in. The usage number is the input a par level needs, and it is the half most rooms do not have cleanly.

The output no one else produces

tasteck outputs the maximum you can spend on each marketing channel next month, as an amount in your currency.

Stock and marketing compete for the same cash. Money sitting on a shelf is money not spent acquiring guests — and until both are expressed as an amount, that trade never gets made deliberately. The spend ceiling is computed from the lifetime value of the guests each source actually delivered, which makes it directly comparable to the cash your par levels are holding.

Nothing else in the nightlife category produces that figure.

Ask it from ChatGPT

tasteck connects to ChatGPT over MCP: ask your numbers as a question and the answer comes back in the chat — what sold by line last month, which weekday carries the volume, how this month compares to last. → Setup guide

Multi-language is built in, the operating surface itself, with your language set during onboarding.

From $34 a month for up to two locations. Thirty days free on every plan, cancel any time. → Pricing

Start this month

1. Pull eight weeks of usage per item. Take the median week.
2. Measure your real lead time, order placed to shelf, for four weeks.
3. Set pars for your top items only. The tail can wait.
4. Write the par where the item lives. Not in a spreadsheet.
5. Compute days of stock once, and ask what you would do with that cash instead.

Read next

• Stock Shrinkage Behind the Bar
• Bottle Service: The Numbers Behind Table Management
• Pricing a Night Out Without Guessing
• The Report You Should Read Every Monday
• Bar and Lounge Software

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On benchmarks. No target days-of-stock figures, buffer percentages, or par formulas appear in this guide. We do not have a dataset broad enough to publish them, and they vary enormously by delivery frequency, storage and format. Eight weeks of your own usage, taken at the median, will set better pars than any published rule.