Bar operations for independent bars
Most bar software counts things. That still leaves all the rest to you.
It says the margin slipped, the pour cost crept up, three bottles are missing. Working out what that means is up to you. So is doing something about it, one screen at a time, after close. Pour5 is built to not stop there.
What it does
It holds the rules you already decided
You decide what a category should earn. You decide what a pour is. You decide which brands sit in the well. Those are yours, and they don't change often. What changes is everything underneath: a case price changes, a product gets discontinued, a delivery arrives short.
Pour5 learns the rule your decisions make, then watches the data for what falls outside it. When something does, it shows you what is wrong and what it should be. Say yes and it does the work. Nothing reaches your register until you approve. We think most software stops at the report and calls that help.
You make the decisions. We do the work.
What it found at a real bar
The audit a consultant charges for, run again and again
One real run: we connected an active bar's Square register and let Pour5 read the menu. 861 items. It correctly identified the bar's five pricing tiers, caught a $117 pricing error, flagged that 60% of the whiskey selection had incomplete pour-size coverage, and separated out 50 non-product items cluttering the catalogue. Before a single bottle was scanned.
That is a menu audit. A consultant will do one for you. Restaurant consultants publish rates from $99 to $350 an hour, so a day of that is real money. And it buys you a menu that is correct on the morning they hand it over. Then costs change, it goes stale, and the next audit costs about the same as the first. Pour5 does that pass for you, and does it again every time something changes. That is like having a bar consultant on staff.
What it covers
Three things you already own, and no order to do them in
Your stock, your deliveries and your register. Start with whatever is annoying you now. Each one you add makes the others sharper, which is where it stops being three tools and starts being one system. See which part fixes which problem →
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Your stock
Most tools hand you an alphabetical list to hunt through bottle by bottle. Pour5 counts in the order your bottles actually sit, so shrinkage, overpours and short deliveries surface without you translating between two orders that don't match. A count becomes a check rather than a survey. We think the list was the wrong shape to begin with.
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Your deliveries
Pour5 reads each delivery from a photo as it arrives. Every bottle is tracked at its real cost, so your margins are facts instead of estimates, and a distributor price rise gets caught when it happens rather than at the next menu reprint.
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Your register
Pour5 reads your menu and comes back with what is wrong in it: pricing gaps, missing costs, duplicate items. It is also how Pour5 learns your vocabulary. Your names, your categories, the way you already group things. Everything it shows you afterwards comes back in that shape, not in ours.
The connection runs both ways. When a cost changes, Pour5 works out which prices are now wrong and brings you the list. Say yes, and it puts the correction where your customers actually see it. For whatever you've handed over, the retyping is gone.
Before and after
One Sunday, with and without it
Before
A distributor price sheet arrives in your inbox. You sit down with a spreadsheet to work out what the new cost does to every pour, every recipe, every price on the menu. That's your Sunday. Then you retype the new prices into the POS by hand, one at a time, hoping you don't miss one.
After
The new cost arrives. Pour5 works out which pours have drifted off your target margin and what each one should now be, and hands you the list. You read it, you say yes, and the register is updated. Sunday goes back to being a day off.
Where it doesn't reach
Pour5 tells you what should be on the shelf. It doesn't walk the room and count it for you. Every count still starts with someone physically checking a bottle, because that's the only way to catch what actually went missing versus what the numbers say should be there.
What Pour5 changes is what that count costs you: a two-minute confirmation against what the system already expects, not an inventory built from nothing. It makes the count faster. It doesn't make it disappear, and we're not going to tell you it does.
Who it's for
- Built for
- Independent bar owners running one to five locations. The person who buys it is the person who uses it, on the floor.
- Register
- Square. Toast and Clover are designed for but not built. A bar running one is what moves it up the list.
- Status
- Private beta. Places are filled by conversation, not sign-up. What that means →
Want in?
Beta is a small number of bars, filled by conversation, not a waitlist. Start by reading what the program asks of a partner.