Cost Centres/Categories in accountancy integrations

Ideas & feature requests
1

Hi there,

In my tickets with Max there was talk about having cost centre/category (different programs use different names) syncing in accountancy integrations. This would be a godsend as I currently have to manually select a cost centre for every order line on synced Breww invoices in my software…

As you imagine this is quite a mind-numbing chore I was wondering how far along this implementation is.

Hope to hear

2

This is something I’ve mentioned before and would be a huge benefit to us. We use Xero’s tracking categories/cost centres and currently our accountants have to do a manual journal at the end of each month to separate our revenue between the taproom and direct trade but it would be useful if we could specify the tracking categories in the Xero integration settings so they didn’t have to do this.

3

We use tracking categories in our accounting software to track beer brewed at different sites. We were wondering if there was any plans to introduce the ability to assign a tracking category to each batch of beer brewed?

4

Thanks for the suggestion Callum and welcome to the Breww Community.

This is a great suggestion and I can see why this would be useful, but I’m not sure it’s something that’s going to be very feasible, to be honest. There are a couple of things that make this difficult to get right:

  1. Xero (and most other accounting platforms) only allow one tracking category per invoice line (product). If you sell someone a single keg of beer, we could add the tracking category for the batch of beer that the keg was from, but what do we do if they bought two kegs and you gave them two kegs from different batches? Mixed pack products would also by definition be impossible to represent to Xero with a single batch/tracking category.
  2. We upload invoices to Xero when they’re invoiced in Breww. We recommend a workflow where you’ve assigned all containers to the delivery before invoicing, which would work OK, but Breww does allow you to manually invoice an order without doing this. In this case, we’d not know the batches of beer that will be assigned, at the time we need to upload the invoice.

Point 2 could potentially be worked around, by delaying the invoice upload, but it would be complicated, and unless we can solve point 1, it wouldn’t make sense to embark on point 2.

We like to improve Breww all the time, but we’re very wary of building features that work in some cases and not others. If you’ve any suggestions on how to get around Xero’s limitations with regards to point 1, we’d love to hear them.

Otherwise, what we often suggest in the case of complex reporting like this, is to simply build the reporting in Breww, where we already have all the information needed, rather than Breww trying to sync more and more information with Xero, so that Xero’s reporting can be used instead. What is the end result report that you’re trying to get to? The easiest option here might well be a report in Breww that we can build instead of embarking on more data to sync to Xero and trying to work around their limitation of just one tracking category per invoice line?

Thanks for the feedback :+1:

5

Hi Luke

Thanks for your reply!

For us, point 1 is largely irrelevant. We brew different styles of beers at our 2 breweries and won’t ever brew the same beer at both sites. We therefore don’t have the batch issue noted. We also don’t sell mixed packs of beers brewed at both sites.

I’m not sure I follow your second point, does the response to point 1 make this point irrelevant? I understand the software adopts a FIFO approach to batches, which could just be applied in the same manner?

6

I’ve merged these two topics together, as they’re both discussions surrounding tracking categories/cost centres/classes - just to keep it all in one place :+1:

We think this would definitely be a useful improvement to Breww’s accountancy integrations. We could allow you to assign a tracking category to a product, customer, customer type and customer group - to allow the most flexibility around how you want to use them. Does this sound like it would support everyone’s requirements for this feature?

@callum-bickers, from the sound of it, because the same beer will only ever be brewed at one site, the ability to assign the tracking category to that beer’s products would solve this issue for you?

7

Hi Max, if we could assign the tracking category to a product that would be great.

8

This is now live :tada:

Breww’s Xero, Quickbooks and Visma accountancy integrations now support syncing tracking categories. You can import your tracking categories into Breww from the “Tracking categories” tab in your accountancy integration dashboard, and then assign them to products, customers, customer types and customer groups.

Breww will then use them to allocate the invoice or credit note line to the appropriate tracking category when uploading invoices and credit notes.

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