In Breww, there is a distinction between your Stock items and your Products. Products are what you sell to your customers, and they can be added to orders. Stock items are the items you purchase from your suppliers, such as ingredients, glassware and even guest beers. To sell an item you purchase as-is (such as glassware), you need to create a stock item for it, and then a product linked to this stock item. This article relates to Stock items.
Your Stock items are made up not only of the items you buy into your brewery but the quantities and batches of these items too. Staying on top of ingredient traceability is a top priority for many brewers and as such, Breww offers a simple and effective way to ensure you’re capturing all the necessary details. We have two tools to ensure you’re keeping tabs of what items come into your inventory; Purchase Orders & Inventory Receipts. The tools can be found in Stock items → Goods In.
Purchase Orders (POs)
If you raise a purchase order in Breww when you place an order with a supplier, we’ll generate a PDF purchase order document and keep a record of what you ordered. This can be sent to your supplier or kept for your own records. From this PO, you can raise an inventory receipt (see below) to confirm the delivery has been received and increase your stock levels. We’ll also show you a handy breakdown of how much stock you’ve received vs how much ordered, so that you can keep track of your deliveries. This makes reporting shortages really simple.
Inventory Receipts
Inventory Receipts are the way to record deliveries of stock items from your suppliers in addition to recording their batch information, delivery location, expiry dates & costings. Whilst in construction, an inventory receipt is in a ‘draft’ state - this means that the detail is saved against this receipt but it has yet to be added to your stock levels. Any batch tracked items on this receipt will need to have their batch codes added - if you’re building the receipt before the stock has yet to arrive, you can leave it as a draft until you have the relevant batch codes.
Once the delivery arrives, or if you already have the batch codes for the items you ordered, you can then assign them to the relevant stock items. If an item arrives made up of multiple batches, you can also record the relevant amount per batch.
Once all relevant detail has been added to the inventory receipt, you can add it to stock. This will result in the status moving from “Draft” to “Added to stock”. Inventory Receipts can be left in this state, or optionally moved on to “Invoiced by supplier” if you’d like to keep track of this in Breww. If this is done, then they can also be synced to your accounting platform automatically for you (as a bill), if you enable this option in your accounting integration settings.
Finally, you also have the ability to edit the item prices on an Inventory Receipt while it’s in the state of “Added to Stock” and this will update all stock items and batch costings throughout Breww. This is useful if you receive the delivery, but when the invoice from the supplier arrives a few days later, you need to modify the cost price. Once it’s been marked as “Invoiced by supplier” the prices cannot be changed.
Adjusting inventory stock
It happens to everyone - you go to your stock room to pick out an item to add to your beer and find that the bag has split or something is past its best & you need to reflect this in your stock item totals. Likewise, you might find an additional box of merchandise and you need to increase your availability.
Breww has full flexibility when it comes to your stock items, items can have their quantity increased or decreased as appropriate, which is really handy when you need to make a quick change. If you need to add to available stock of an item, you can simply use the “Add quantity” button within a stock item itself. Or, if you need to adjust the quantity of a batch already in stock, you can scroll to the “Stock” tab of an item and select the “Edit quantity & details” button.
Importing stock item details
Breww also has an importer to bring new stock items into your account in bulk, this supports CSV, Excel and some other file formats. This is great for when you’re starting out with Breww or if you need to bring a number of new items in at once. Importing stock item data is split across two separate importers:
- Stock Items - This is where you bring the names of your items into Breww in addition to descriptors such as their type, unit of measurement & whether they are batch tracked.
- Stock Levels & Batches - This is how you specify how much you have in stock when you first migrate to Breww. You can also specify batch numbers and expiry dates where applicable.
Both of these importers can be found in Settings → Data Imports & Updates in addition to import tools for your customers, tracked containers, packaged beer stock and more.