A bottle is
not a unit.
It is thirty.
Every other trade sells the thing it bought. A bar buys a litre and sells it in twenty-five millilitre pieces, over a night, by hand, in the dark, at speed. That gap is where a bar's money goes, and no till that treats a bottle as one item will ever show you it.
Stock that
walks.
Friday closes and the takings look fine. What the takings cannot tell you is that the gin poured eleven per cent heavy all night, that two tabs walked out unpaid, and that the tonic ran out at half nine so forty people drank something else. None of it is theft and all of it is margin, and by Monday nobody can reconstruct any of it.
What stops happening
- Counting spirits by eye and calling the difference wastage
- A tab left open at the end of the night with nobody attached to it
- Guessing what a cocktail costs to pour
- Running dry on a Saturday and never seeing the sale you lost
- Three staff behind one till and no way to tell whose round was whose
Restaurant
& café.
The setup wizard offers four kinds of shop. A bar takes the Restaurant & café type, which covers restaurants, cafés, bars, takeaways, food trucks and cloud kitchens — the trades that run a tab rather than a basket.
You choose · Restaurant & café
Tables and open tabs
A tab belongs to a table, stays open across a night, and closes as one sale. Tables are optional, so a taproom with a bar and no table service can run tabs without a floor plan it does not need.
Recipes, and the kitchen screen
A drink is made of things. Recipes take those things out of stock when it sells, and the kitchen screen carries food orders where there is a kitchen behind the bar.
Batches and expiry
The Restaurant & café type turns on perishable columns too, because a kitchen is legally obliged to care about dates. On a bar that matters for the food and the mixers rather than the spirits.
Anything the choice leaves out is hidden, not removed. You are not locked out of a thing by picking wrong at setup — a clothes shop simply is not shown expiry dates it will never use, and a grocery is not shown a size matrix. Change your mind and it is all still there.
Three things
that carry
a bar.
A cocktail is a recipe
Sell a negroni and the gin, the vermouth and the campari come out of stock as measures, at what those bottles cost you today. Pour cost stops being something you work out once a year and becomes a number the system already holds — per drink, on every drink, including the ones somebody invented for the specials board.
One tab across a night
A table orders four times over three hours and pays once. That is one sale with the whole night on it, not four sales that happened near each other — which is the difference between a bill a customer recognises and an argument at closing.
Blind counts on the spirits
Count the bottles with the system figure hidden, commit, then see the variance. What that variance actually measures in a bar is over-pouring, and it is the only number that will ever tell you about it. Because nothing moves stock without the ledger recording who and when, a difference has a shift attached to it rather than a shrug.
Tables, tabs, recipes and the kitchen screen are all part of the paid restaurant module — the free core is a till and Stock Central, and does not do any of them. Blind stock takes and costing are in the paid add-on. Batch and expiry dates are recorded free, but the report on what is about to go out of date sits on the paid Valuation screen.
What a bar
should know
first.
A bar exposes more of our limits than any other trade on this site, because a bar is fast, cash-heavy, staffed by several people at once, and legally obliged to check ages. Here is where that lands.
No age verification prompt
The till will not stop a sale, ask for a date of birth, or record that anybody checked. Age verification stays entirely with your staff and whatever you already do. On this trade that is a limitation worth reading twice.
No PIN, and no tips
Staff sign in with an ordinary WordPress login, so three people behind one bar share a password rather than holding a four-digit code each. There is also no tip handling at all — no prompt, no split, no pooling, nothing recorded.
The drawer does not open on its own
The Open drawer button records who opened it and when, but sends no signal. A drawer wired to a receipt printer will not spring. On a cash-heavy bar at full tilt, that is a real difference in rhythm.
A print dialog on every receipt
Receipts go through the browser's print dialog rather than straight to a thermal printer. One extra confirmation per receipt is one thing at a shop counter and another thing entirely at eleven on a Friday.
We would rather lose the sale here than in week one.
For this trade.
Can a recipe handle a measure rather than a whole bottle?
Does it tell me a bottle poured heavy?
We have a bar and a kitchen. Does food work too?
Can I take a tab without using tables?
Can two bartenders serve the same tab?
Pour cost on every drink.
Variance on every bottle.
The till is free on WordPress.org, though the service and stockroom features on this page are not. Put it on staging and cost one cocktail properly — that is the test.