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Most bars don’t lose money evenly. The majority of variance, theft, and over-pouring happens in a handful of products and a few specific shifts. That’s why Shift Audits are such a powerful weapon.

Instead of trying to fix everything at once, you use an 80–20 approach: audit the top 10–20 products driving most of your sales and get real-time accountability on what’s happening behind the bar.

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Why Full Inventories Aren’t Enough

Full inventories are essential. They:

• Benchmark your total stock
• Inform tax reporting and long-term trend analysis
• Guide big-picture purchasing and pricing decisions

But they’re also:

• Time-consuming
• Usually done weekly or monthly
• Too slow to catch rapidly emerging problems

By the time you see a variance, the damage is already done.

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What a Shift Audit Is (and Isn’t)

A Shift Audit in Easy Inventory is a targeted, fast inventory check focused on your highest-impact items.

It’s not:

• A full count of every product
• A one-off emergency measure
• A replacement for weekly or monthly audits

Instead, it’s a tactical control tool designed to:

• Weigh or count top-moving products quickly
• Compare actual usage vs. expected usage based on sales and recipes
• Generate a detailed report that shows where the shift went off track

All of this can be done in under 10 minutes once your system and recipes are set up.

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How Easy Inventory Operationalizes Shift Audits

Inside Easy Inventory, you can:

• Select your top-selling products for the audit
• Pull in sales data from your POS
• Use existing recipes and pour sizes to calculate expected usage
• Generate reports that highlight:
  • Unexplained losses
  • Over-pouring patterns
  • Consistent problem shifts or bartenders

Because Easy Inventory is a full bar inventory management system, Shift Audit data doesn’t live in isolation. It feeds into your broader accountability and variance reporting.

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The Business Impact of Regular Shift Audits

Run consistently, Shift Audits deliver compounding benefits:

• Lower variance on your top movers
• Faster behavioral corrections when staff know shifts are monitored
• Better guest experience as over-pouring and under-pouring are reduced
• Increased profitability without raising prices, simply by capturing product that used to disappear

You’re essentially moving from “we hope the bar did fine this week” to “we know exactly what happened last night.”

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Shift Audit + Full Inventory: A Complete Control Stack

The real power comes when you combine:

• Full Inventory for big-picture, period-based control
• Shift Audits for daily or intra-week tactical control

Together, they create a robust bar inventory management system that’s both strategic and real-time.

If you’re ready to stop flying blind and start managing your top products with precision, Easy Inventory’s Shift Audit feature is the quickest, least disruptive way to start tightening up your bar—one high-impact product at a time.

Spreadsheets and manual counts worked when you had a short menu and one busy night a week. In today’s environment—tight labor, rising costs, and demanding guests—you need a bar inventory management system built for speed, accuracy, and accountability.

That’s exactly the problem Easy Inventory was designed to solve.

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From Bottles to Ounces: Category by Size

One of the toughest parts of liquor inventory is that every product looks different: various bottle sizes, kegs, wine formats, packaged beer, and draft.

Easy Inventory’s “Category by Size” feature normalizes that chaos:

• Spirits, drafts, and wines are converted into ounces
• Packaged beer is counted as single units
• Reports are generated at the drink level, with clear links to vendor orders

This lets you run your bar on one consistent unit of measure, making reports and decisions dramatically easier.

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Deep POS Integration and Recipes

A modern bar inventory management system has to connect with your point of sale. Easy Inventory integrates with virtually any POS or cash register, importing sales data and mapping each POS key to:

• Recipes with detailed product usage
• Pour sizes per drink
• Vendor information for each item

The result is a live bridge between what you sell and what you actually use. That’s how you get meaningful insights on pour cost, variance, and profitability.

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Shift Audits and Real-Time Accountability

Rather than waiting for a month-end surprise, Easy Inventory lets you run Shift Audits in under 10 minutes focusing on your top movers.

This gives you:

• Fast visibility into over-pouring or missing product
• Insight into problematic shifts or bartenders
• Immediate feedback loops to change behavior

Because 80% of your sales come from ~20% of your items, auditing those frequently gives you disproportionate control over your results.

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Built for Scale: Multi-Venue, Unlimited Auditors, Deep Reporting

Easy Inventory isn’t just a counting tool—it’s a full bar inventory management system for single sites and multi-unit groups. Key capabilities include:

• Unlimited inventory across liquor, beer, wine, and draft
• Multiple venues managed from a single dashboard
• Unlimited auditor logins so any staff can collect data without seeing financial reports
• Automated purchase orders broken out by vendor
• Historical logs and reports for past months and years

On top of that, you get specialized reports like:

• Pour Variance Report
• Usage Report by category
• Summary and Accountability Reports
• Product Variance details for top movers

All designed to let you see, in minutes, where money is being made or lost.

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Try Easy Inventory with Minimal Risk

Easy Inventory offers a 30-day free trial with access to all core features, allowing you to test the platform in your real operation, with real data.

If you’re ready to replace spreadsheets with a purpose-built bar inventory management system, Easy Inventory gives you the structure, automation, and analytics you need to run beverage control like a pro.