Margins at NYC bars are already tight before you account for rent, payroll, and licensing. Losing product to shrinkage, over-pouring, or theft can quietly turn a profitable bar into one that’s barely breaking even. The way to catch it is through consistent physical counts and pour cost analysis broken out by category.

Start with weekly physical counts of every open and sealed bottle behind the bar and in storage. Estimate open bottles in tenths. A bottle that looks about 60% full gets recorded as 0.6. This doesn’t need to be perfect to the milliliter. It needs to be consistent so you can spot trends. Count on the same day each week, ideally during a slow period when nothing is being poured.

Once you have your beginning inventory, purchases for the week, and ending inventory, calculate your usage. Beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory equals what was consumed. Compare that consumption in dollars to what your POS system says you sold in each category.

Pour cost is the number that tells you whether something is off. The formula is simple: cost of liquor used divided by liquor sales for the same period. For spirits, a healthy pour cost in NYC typically falls between 18% and 22%. Beer runs 24% to 28%. Wine lands around 28% to 35%. If your liquor pour cost is consistently above 22-24%, something is wrong. That could be bartenders free-pouring heavy, giving away drinks to friends, or outright theft.

Break your tracking into those three categories at minimum. Lumping all alcohol together hides problems. Your beer numbers might look fine while your spirits are bleeding money. Separating the categories lets you pinpoint where the variance is happening and address it directly.

Use your POS data to cross-reference. If you sold 40 gin and tonics according to the register but your gin usage suggests 55 were poured, that gap needs an explanation. Restaurant and bar bookkeeping should tie these inventory figures into your cost of goods sold each month so your financial statements reflect actual product cost rather than just what you purchased.

A few practical tips that make a difference. Use jiggers instead of free-pouring if shrinkage is a problem. Install cameras at the bar and in the storage room. Require manager approval for comps and voids and track those separately in your POS. Rotate who does the physical count so no single person controls both the inventory and the reporting.

The bookkeeping side matters just as much as the physical side. If purchases aren’t recorded accurately or invoices from your distributor aren’t matched to what was actually delivered, your pour cost calculations will be off from the start. Bronx bookkeepers who understand the bar business will reconcile distributor invoices, track COGS by category, and flag pour cost variances on your monthly reports before small losses become big ones.

Weekly counting takes 30 to 45 minutes once your team has a routine. That time pays for itself many times over. Most bars that don’t track inventory are losing 10-20% more product than they realize, and in a city where every dollar of margin matters, that’s the difference between staying open and closing down.