hagar681 Posted January 16, 2013 Posted January 16, 2013 I know this subject has been brought up on the board before, but I would like to restart it and see if there are any better answers out there. I am curious what accounting software people are running. More specifically, people who run distilleries that can sell to the public by the glass as well as by the bottle. I am assuming the vast majority of people are using some version of Quickbooks and I'm wondering if there are many problems in handling the many different types of transactions from production to sales. I spoke with a Quickbooks representative about the Quickbooks POS system and he actually told me that it would probably not work well with individual drink and food sales. Barring those transactions he thought it would work fine. We will be operating a distillery with a tasting room and be able to sell drinks by the glass and sales by the bottle. We also can sell direct to other retail establishments (bars, restaurants, etc.) and if we choose we can sell to the state store system. We also can sell food products and various novelty items. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
bluestar Posted January 16, 2013 Posted January 16, 2013 Quickbooks Manufacturing, inventory builds, tasting/retail room as a separate division activity, no POS yet. Don't generate TTB data from QB, custom Filemaker database, which actually tracks some of the same data in the QB inventory. Working on ways to integrate the two. Work in progress, would love to hear other similar solutions and experience.
Beauport Bob Posted January 18, 2013 Posted January 18, 2013 Would you want to track the store and related sales separate from your distillery? It seems the margins for the store items would unreasonabley inflate the distillery operation. So treat your store as a customer and let it have its own set of books.
JohninWV Posted January 19, 2013 Posted January 19, 2013 We use Quickbooks manufacturing, like Bluestar mentioned above, and use builds for all of our products (retail and wholesale items). We fought it for a long time because I've used "classes" in Quickbooks before and didn't like it. I think Bluestar and I actually discussed this in the past too. But recently we've found the "classes" system to work well by dividing retail, production, and management costs. It keeps us from seeing inflated costs in any one category as Bob suggested above. It's important for you to get a good idea of where you are making more...or not making money. We've looked into POS systems with QB but never made the leap. I'd like to have more detail in my retail section. For instance, I know how many T-shirts I sold, but I don't know which design or size, just the total number. I think POS would be great for that. I also think POS would be easy for food and drink, if it's limited like it will probably be in the distillery. More than you asked for.... But Quickbooks is limited in calculating the true cost of inventory, if that is important to you. For instance, we've recently spent some time to figuring out exactly how much it costs to produce a barrel of whiskey including labor, rent, utilities, storage, insurance, etc built into the cost. Basically, a cost accounting. As our business has grown, it's become more important for us to treat items like this versus having inventory as a function of just the COG and then having expenses. Is that clear as mud?
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