A note on duty and manual adjustments
The duty for a sale doesn’t become liable until the beer leaves the brewery (usually for delivery), so producing beer and manually increasing stock levels will never trigger any duty liability. This also in turn means that a reclaim is only needed if the beer was delivered before it was “lost” (for whatever reason).
If you reduce your stock levels using a manual stock adjustment (or stock take), and this reduces stock where duty has already been paid (e.g. it was previously returned from a customer), then this might trigger a duty reclaim. For casks/kegs, this will be done if you pick a specific tracked container that’s been returned. For other items where specific units are not tracked (by you - we track everything behind the scenes), Breww will look first for items where duty has been paid already and put in a reclaim for these (if there are any) before it looks at items where duty hasn’t been paid yet.
Ullaging lost beer
To make an ullage, when the beer is lost having previously left the brewery for a customer, you should use one of the ullage tools in Breww so that Breww can track this for you and save you time. When using an ullage tool, Breww will ensure the duty return is correctly updated automatically. This can be done in a couple of ways:
- Go to Containers → Actions & tools → Ullage a container, find the customer, and mark the correct container as ullaged.
- If you’re making a container collection, it’s usually easiest to go to the customer, then Containers in trade & uplift orders tab and raise an Uplift order. This uplift order will be scheduled into a date and can be added to a delivery run. The driver can then confirm the collection of the containers and which (if any) are needing to be ullaged (along with the ullage volume in Litres).
If you sell a container of beer to a customer (and deliver it to them), then the duty will be added to your return for this. If they then return the beer for some reason, but it’s not actually lost and can be re-sold, you should use the Return items button on the original delivery. This will bring the container back into Breww still full of beer so that it can be resold. At this point, as per HMRC’s rules, the duty cannot be reclaimed but Breww knows you have already paid duty on this container so when it is subsequently delivered to another customer, Breww will not add it to your duty return again. If in the event that it’s not resold and instead is subsequently ullaged, Breww will reclaim the duty for you, so either way you shouldn’t lose out on the duty.
Ullaging beer sold before switching to Breww
If you sold some beer before using Breww and this now needs to be ullaged, Breww’s ullage tool won’t be able to handle this (as it doesn’t know about the original sale). In this case, your best option is to make a manual adjustment to your duty return. For more info on this please see the “Notes & manual adjustment” section of 📘 Introduction to beer duty
