We are relatively new to Breww and have been grappling with the way to handle retail sales through our brewery shop and taproom. As suggested we have been raising invoices to the shop & tap to take stock from our bonded at zero cost for beer duty purposes. We use EposNow for our POS system and have been raising separate invoices through Xero for these sales. This creates the potential problem of duplicating invoice numbers within Xero so to try and combat this we have been reserving a bank of numbers in Xero purely for these invoices. This is all a bit of a hack and not ideal to manage. It would be interesting to hear how others manage this.
As an alternative approach would it be possible to create a non-bonded location for the shop & taproom and transfer stock to there taking care of the beer duty requirement, then put sales through Breww allocating the stock from the shop & tap stock (i.e. duty paid)?
Yes, your alternative approach is definitely a possibility. In addition to this, we have integrations available with Square and Zettle, where invoices can be automatically brought into Breww (and synced with Xero) and stock to be automatically taken from your non-bonded site.
Do you think Stripe would be in the pipeline? It would be great to use Stripe terminal and not another payment gateway as we already use Stripe for WooCommerce.
Yes, potentially. We’re working on our payment platform at the moment and hope to add Stripe Terminal to that but I can’t say for sure at this stage. If we can support Stripe Terminal, this will almost certainly come with a later release.
Would you also be looking for a POS platform that’s built into Breww to input orders in a more-POS-like way? Or is the current order entry screen all good, you’d just like to take in-person payments with it?
Yes, a POS platform would be great. To then use Stripe terminal device like Square or Zettle. Having the ability to have a Stripe button for customers to pay their invoices would be great too!
I’m afraid we don’t have an update on EposNow. It is certainly an integration we want to build, but we just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’ve created a formal feature request for it, here, which you can vote for. If you make sure you’re ‘watching’ the post, you’ll be notified when there’s an update (you can ‘watch’ the post by scrolling to the bottom and clicking ‘Tracking’ and changing it to ‘Watching’).
Forgive me for jumping onto this thread but I hope our issues will help others who are interested in the Bar/Tap room set-up.
We have a tap room where we sell our beer from our Brite tanks. We also do small pack and send kegs out to customers. Both the small pack and kegs are taken from the Brites (BBT).
So we take the easy route and ‘sell’ our beer (for free) to the tap room once it is in the BBTs, carbonated and conditioned (ie ready for drinking). This deals with duty for the whole tank, meaning when we drop beer to small packs or kegs, we have already paid duty,
So far so good! Not economically smart but easier for us to handle and less open for mistakes. We do use Xero and Square but find dealing with the INV numbers and endless duplication of sales is too time consuming, so keep the tap room sales (via Square) separate from the brewery side in Breww.
What I’d like to figure out is a way to drop kegs from the BBT’s in the tap room and still run them through Breww for tracking purposes’, keeping all the customers’ details within Breww. I realise this is a bit of ‘wanting best of both worlds’, but is it possible? Do I need to set up the tap-room as a second site, sell the beer from the brewery to the tap, and then distribute kegs from the tap room ‘site’?
Hi Simon, great idea. Hopefully, others will benefit from this too. You will have to correct me if I have misunderstood, but it sounds like you rack pints and kegs directly from a BBT but only want to track the kegs individually, not the pints.
This is a slightly tricky one, but the only way I think you could do this without tracking pints would be to manage each Brite tank after its volume was fully sold. Then you could rack the required kegs from it and track them. You would then sell the whole rest of the Brite tank volume, knowing it’s gone into pints.
Let me know if that covers the issue you are having.
Thanks for the response but in our case this solution wouldn’t work. For example, in a month we may be serving pints from the Brite to the tap room, and half way through the month we get an order for a keg for instance. We drop the beer from the BBT to the keg for the sale. I’d like then to be able to track this keg as it leaves the brewery and eventually returns. If I simply increase my keg stock by ‘filling’ a keg and process it this way, I end up paying duty twice…once on the BBT and then again on the keg, Does that help clarify?
Ah, I see! In this circumstance, there is not really a workaround I can suggest. The problem is essentially that to be able to work with kegs you rack from BBT and Pints in the taproom; you would have to track both in Breww, meaning reconnecting the taproom sales, as Breww cannot partially track what happens to the volume from the Brite tank.
You are correct in that if you create a stock adjustment to sell a keg, you would be charged duty on this sale, you could get around that by performing a duty adjustment to account for that, but that would be extra work. I would also suggest this leaves you open to overpaying duty if anything is missed. The other downside would be that your production and sales figures reported would be false, as you would have told Breww that an additional volume had been created and sold from that batch.
Hmm, maybe the work around is not to sell the BBT to the tap room, but rather rack he BBT volume into ‘ghost’ kegs and sell these one at a time to the tap room as beer is pulled from the taps (ie every 50L pulled, sell another ghost 50L keg). Then Breww would have a stock of ‘kegs’ that could be sold externally too?
Yes, that could work. If you’re happy to have these ‘ghost’ kegs in Breww and don’t think they would cause confusion within your team, then this would be an option.
