We make a tool that counts in tenths, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to be fair: there are bars that should weigh.
Counting in tenths
You look at the bottle and call how full it is, to the nearest tenth. Nothing to buy, nothing to set up, and a practiced counter moves as fast as they can read labels.
- Accuracy: within a tenth when counted with care. The shoulder and neck of the bottle hold less than the body, so calls near full or near empty drift a little. Across a bar, the misses mostly cancel out.
- Speed: as fast as you can read the shelf.
- Costs: nothing up front.
- Goes wrong when: counters change every week, or someone rounds every bottle to the half. Consistency matters more than precision.
Weighing
You set each open bottle on a scale. The software knows the empty weight of that bottle and turns grams into ounces left.
- Accuracy: to a fraction of an ounce, when the empty weight in the database matches your bottle. When a brand changes its glass, the number is confidently wrong until someone notices.
- Speed: every open bottle comes off the shelf, onto the scale and back. Sealed bottles are still counted by eye.
- Costs: the scale, usually a subscription for the software that knows the bottle weights, and the time to pick up every bottle.
- Goes wrong when: a pour spout, a speed cap or a bottle from a different run changes the empty weight.
Which one you need
Weigh if you run a high-volume bar where a few ounces a bottle adds up to real money every week, you're chasing a specific loss and need to prove it, or your most expensive bottles deserve exact numbers.
Count in tenths if you want a weekly count that actually gets done, you care about trends more than the exact ounce, or you don't want to buy hardware to find out whether you have a problem.
A good middle ground: count everything in tenths, and weigh only the handful of top-shelf bottles where an ounce matters.
The part both methods skip
Whichever way you count, the number only means something next to what you sold. A perfectly weighed bottle tells you nothing about whether that missing ounce was a heavy pour, a comp, or a drink rung as the wrong item. That comes from variance: sales, turned into pours through your recipes, set against the count.