The reason for this is that the electricity costs for chilling a vessel is dependent on the amount of litres of beer that need to be chilled and the amount of days this very volume of beer is in tank.
The difference in electricity costs (for chilling) for a 200L batch that is in tank for 10 days vs a 2000L batch that is in tank for 100 days cannot be calculated with the current options as I cannot attribute one cost for these two batches (“per batch”) but also I cannot select “per litre into initial vessel” as the occupation time of the beer in the two vessels are different. To calculate the chilling costs (electricity) one needs to take both those factors (time and volume) into consideration at the same time.
Maybe there is already a way around that and I just cannot find it…
Thanks for the great suggestion and you’re right this cannot be set up automatically yet.
At the moment, all of the automatic utility/other batch costs are applied at the beginning of the batch, and so we’d need to change how this works for this, as it obviously would have to be calculated on batch completion. For this reason, this is most complicated for us to implement than it probably looks on the surface, but we can certainly see what we can do.
I’ve a couple of initial questions:
If we were to add this option and a 1000L batch was split over two 500L vessels, in each for 10 days (at the same time), should this count as 20 days x 500L? I presume this is what’s expected, rather than 500L x 10 days, but I wanted to double-check?
Do all vessels count? Or would this only be for fermenters, for example, and some other vessels might be used without adding to the number of days in vessel?
in my excel spreadsheet I break down all the costs we have per month (hire costs of equipment for example) and calculate how much of this monthly cost gets attributed to each vessel.
Let’s say you hire equipment X for £100 per month and you have 2x 100L fermenters that are occupied for 2x 15 days each within this month. This would mean that these £100 would get spread over four batches of 100L for 15 days so the formula for this specific cost would be
cost per L = (ÂŁ100/(30days/month*200L (total fermentation capacity)) * 15days = ÂŁ0.25
for hire equipment one needs to take fermenter down time into consideration as the hire costs still need to be paid even in circumstances when you do not brew any beer. So Ideally you would want days a fermenter is idle also included into those costs. Let’s say you have 7 down days, then you fill the FV up and have beer in there for 23 days, then the calculation for that batch in that vessel would use 30days (23days actual occupation time and the 7 days before the FV was filled with product)
This above does not apply for electricity as chilling is obviously only used for full fermenters.
For electricity I simplified the calculation as to achieve 100% accuracy will be extremely difficult. I took our monthly electricity bills (averaged them throughout the year as in summer it will be higher than in winter due to the temperatures) and then treated electricity like a hire cost in the example above.
Regarding your question:
yes, it is all about volume in the fermenter over a certain period of time so 20 days x 500L.
Only fermentation vessels and bright beer tanks (all vessels that hold finished wort, so Brewhouse vessels do not count)
Would be great to add automatic additional costs by tank days and volume racked on top of volume into initial vessel. This would allow us to tailor costs to account for shorter or longer production timelines for different products e.g Seltzers vs Lagers.
could you add a function to pull a raw material associated with a utility cost? For example if I put ÂŁ100 as a propane utility cost, I would want the amount of propane from the tanks pulled from stock so that not only the costing will be more accurate but also the stock value of the utility.
In this situation, I’d recommend adding the cost via the “Add other” button in the “Ingredients” tab instead of them being a “Utility/other cost”. The most significant difference between the two ways of adding costs is that one is linked to a stock item (and consumes stock) and the other isn’t; linking a utility cost to a stock item would blur the lines between the two, to be honest.
