Somebody was kept waiting, somebody is a regular, somebody complained. A drink goes out and nothing is rung through. By the end of the year it is a real number, and no venue can tell you what it is.

A guest waited too long. A regular brought three people. Somebody complained about the music. In each case a drink went out and nothing was rung through.

⚠️ Every one of those was the right call. ⭕ The problem is not that it happened — it is that it happened four hundred times last year and nobody can say so.

⚠️ One thing to settle elsewhere

⛔ How comped stock is treated in your books, and whether there is any restriction where you are on giving alcohol away, are questions for your accountant and whoever handles your licence. ⭕ Settle those before changing anything about volume.

⭕ What follows is the operational half: who may give it away, what it costs, and why it never appears anywhere.

Why it is invisible

⭕ Four reasons, and they compound.

Nothing is rung through

⇒ ⭕ A sale that is not entered leaves no trace in the takings. ⚠️ ⭕ The stock moves and the record does not, which is the whole mechanism.

The stock difference is blamed on something else

⭕ At the count it looks like breakage, over-pouring, or theft. ⚠️ ⭕ Comps are usually the largest of those four and the only one nobody suspects.

Each one is defensible on its own

⚠️ ⭕ No individual instance is wrong. ⭕ That is exactly why the total never gets examined — every part of it survives scrutiny.

And nobody wants to be the person counting kindness

⇒ ⭕ Asking about it sounds like meanness, so it does not get asked. ⚠️ ⭕ The result is that a genuine tool becomes an unmeasured leak.

⇒ The Cash Room: Reconciliation That Actually Reconciles

What it is actually costing

⭕ The number surprises people. Here is how to get to it.

Cost, not menu price

⚠️ ⭕ A comped drink costs you what it cost you — not what it would have sold for. ⛔ ⭕ Valuing comps at menu price makes the figure look catastrophic and gets the exercise abandoned.

But menu price is the right number for one question

⇒ ⭕ If the guest would have bought it anyway, you gave away the margin, not the cost. ⚠️ ⭕ That distinction is the whole judgement, and it is knowable per situation.

The volume is the surprise, not the unit

⭕ Three a night, five nights a week, is over seven hundred a year. ⚠️ ⭕ Almost nobody guesses within a factor of two of their own number.

And it concentrates in a few hands

⇒ ⭕ It is rarely spread evenly across the team. ⚠️ ⭕ One or two people usually account for most of it, and they are often your most generous and most liked staff.

⇒ The Person Everyone Asks First

The four reasons it goes out, and they are not equal

⭕ Separating these is what turns a leak back into a tool.

Recovery after something went wrong

⭕ A long wait, a wrong order, a complaint. ⚠️ ⭕ This is the one with the clearest return and the one most worth protecting.

Building a relationship with a regular

⇒ ⭕ Genuine, and it is where the judgement is hardest. ⚠️ ⭕ A regular who expects one every visit is no longer being built — the arrangement has changed and nobody said so.

⇒ What a Regular Is Actually Worth

Because it was asked for

⛔ ⚠️ This is a different thing entirely, and it is the one that grows if it works.

⇒ The Guest Who Always Asks For A Discount

And staff drinking or giving to friends

⚠️ ⭕ However you decide to handle this, it needs to be decided rather than assumed. ⭕ Unspoken rules here produce more resentment than any written one.

⇒ The Rules You Enforce Only Sometimes

Recording it costs almost nothing

⭕ One button, or one line. That is the whole change.

Ring it through at zero

⇒ ⭕ Most tills can take a sale at zero with a reason attached. ⚠️ ⭕ This is far better than not entering it, because the stock movement and the record stay together.

Four reasons, not free text

Recovery — something went wrong
Regular  — relationship
Asked    — guest requested it
Staff    — staff or their guests

And the name of whoever authorised it

⚠️ ⭕ Not to blame anybody. ⭕ Without it you cannot see the concentration, and the concentration is the finding.

Written at the moment, like everything else

⇒ ⭕ Reconstructed at the end of the night it is a guess, and the reasons are the first thing to blur.

⇒ The Hours Nobody Wrote Down

Deciding who may do it

⭕ This is the decision most venues have never actually made.

If everybody can, nobody decided

⚠️ ⭕ Where any member of staff can send a drink out, there is no policy — there is a set of individual habits that happen to coexist.

A limit works better than a rule

⇒ ⭕ "Up to two a shift, recorded" is workable. ⚠️ ⭕ "Ask a manager first" fails at eleven on a Saturday, so it gets ignored and you are back to no policy.

Name what needs no permission

⭕ Recovery after a genuine mistake should not require finding somebody. ⚠️ ⭕ Making people ask for that is how complaints stop getting fixed at the table.

And review the limit rather than policing it

⇒ ⭕ Somebody consistently at the limit is telling you something — about their section, their guests, or the limit.

What to look at once you have a month

Four readings, and none of them needs a system.

The split by reason

⚠️ ⭕ Mostly recovery means something upstream is going wrong, and the comps are the symptom rather than the problem.

⇒ The Guest Who Stopped Coming and Nobody Noticed

The split by person

⇒ ⭕ Expect it to be uneven. Look at whether the uneven part is buying anything.

The regulars who receive them

⭕ Cross the list against what those guests actually spend. ⚠️ ⭕ Some of them will be your best guests. Some will only be regular because it is free, and until now those looked identical.

⇒ The Average Spend That Is Not An Average

And what the stock count says afterwards

⚠️ ⭕ If the unexplained difference falls once comps are recorded, you have just found where it was going. ⭕ That is worth knowing regardless of what you decide next.

⇒ The Bottle You Bought For One Guest

What not to do with the number

⛔ Three ways this goes wrong once people can see it.

Do not stop it altogether

⚠️ ⭕ A venue that cannot send a drink out after a mistake has lost a cheap and effective tool. ⭕ The goal is a visible figure, not a smaller one.

Do not use it to catch people

⇒ ⭕ The first month of data is the month people learn to record. ⛔ ⭕ Using it against somebody in that month guarantees the recording stops.

And do not judge it against zero

⭕ The right comparison is what it bought, not what it cost. ⚠️ ⭕ A recovery comp that kept a regular is cheaper than almost anything else you could have done.

What good looks like

The total test

Ask what was given away last month. ⇒ A figure means it is recorded. "Not much" means it is not, and it is more than that.

The reason test

⚠️ Ask for the split by reason. One category means the reasons are not being captured, whatever the total says.

The authority test

Working     — a named limit, recorded, reviewed monthly
Not working — anybody can, nobody counts, and the stock count is a mystery

Three to hold

1  Every single one is defensible; the total is what nobody has looked at
2  Cost, not menu price — valuing at menu price gets the exercise abandoned
3  The goal is a visible number, not a smaller one

Where the record has to sit

Every drink that went out unpaid, which of the four reasons it was, who authorised it, and for whom — entered at the moment as a zero-value sale with a reason, kept with the other operating records rather than absorbed into the stock difference. ⛔ Settle the books and licensing side with your accountant and licensing adviser separately. Kept there, you can see within a month whether the comps are buying relationships or covering a problem upstream, and your stock count starts reconciling. Kept nowhere, a genuine and useful tool sits inside the unexplained difference, and the only way anybody notices is when somebody decides it must be theft.

⇒ The Report You Open Every Monday

The Drink That Was On The House