Hi everyone,
Thanks for all the detail here, and sorry it’s taken a while to come back properly.
Reading this alongside the CLS auto-assign thread, we think the root of the problem isn’t converting kegs. It’s that Breww has no proper way to represent a distributor like CLS. Today the only option is to set CLS up as one of your own sites and stock transfer to it. That tells Breww the kegs are still in your warehouse, so it expects you to pick specific tracked kegs for every CLS sale. That’s where the unassigned deliveries, the “full” empties and the need to convert kegs all come from.
We’re planning proper distributor support (which would also be helpful for many breweries outside Alberta), and here’s how it would work for CLS:
- CLS would be set up as a “distributor customer”, with stock sent on consignment.
- Kegs go to CLS on a normal delivery and are scanned out as usual. Tracked kegs stay tracked, and Breww shows them as being at CLS, so you can see your float there.
- CLS’s sales come in as “onward sales” from CLS to the end customer. They don’t need kegs assigned, never create a delivery to sign off, and don’t take stock out of your inventory a second time. That should stop the build-up of incomplete deliveries.
- When empties come back from CLS, you return them as you would from any customer, as empty. If full kegs come back, they come back as full tracked kegs, with no need for “package from containers”.
- You’d see how much of each product CLS is holding, kept separate from your own available stock, and consignment stock still counts towards your stock value.
- Non-returnable kegs to CLS keep working as they do today.
What it won’t tell you is which bar a specific keg went to, only that it’s at CLS. As you’ve all said, that information isn’t available anyway.
Kegs you send to CLS on consignment are still your stock until CLS sells them, and Breww would treat them that way:
- Your stock valuation would include the consignment stock CLS is holding, shown on its own lines so you can see how much of your stock value is at CLS.
- If you have balance sheet syncing turned on for your accounting software integration, the cost of that stock moves into a “consignment stock” account when it’s dispatched to CLS, rather than straight into cost of goods sold. It only moves to cost of goods sold once the stock is sold.
- Kegs that come back still filled from CLS move back into your finished goods.
- Anything a distributor buys outright, rather than taking on consignment, is their stock as soon as it leaves you, and is handled as a normal sale.
With the above ideas, we don’t expect to build automatic tracked/non-tracked conversion on stock transfer, or a per-site tracking mode. With distributor support, you shouldn’t need to convert kegs for CLS at all. Once it’s in place, we’d also look at bringing the Liquor Connect sales import into it, so CLS sales arrive as onward sales automatically, and with an easy way to switch an existing CLS site over.
If anything here wouldn’t work with how you deal with CLS, please tell us, and two questions in particular would help:
- Do you get anything back from CLS about kegs, such as a regular stock report, that we could use to keep the numbers accurate (other than the files you can already import into Breww via the Connect Logistics & AGLC integration)?
- For planning your float, would knowing how long each keg spends at CLS between leaving you and coming back be enough?
Please let us know what you think about this solution. Cheers!