Our brewery has a taproom. When we move beer out of inventory to sell in the taproom, we have to create an invoice to remove that beer from inventory. Our bartenders don’t have time to log into Breww, create an invoice, flip over to the delivery side, scan the kegs, and confirm the delivery. Currently we have them record the keg IDs removed from inventory (as well as the cases of cans) on a piece of paper in the cooler, then once a week we create the invoice and process the sale. That means our inventory numbers are only up to date once a week. There has got to be a better way to do this.
My suggestion would be to have a tab on the app, where our bartenders (who don’t use Breww otherwise) can scan the keg or select the cans they need and it’s immediately marked as sold without requiring an invoice.
3 Likes
Had exactly the same problem in a previous job. Tried to get them to “move stock” to a “taproom stock” location.
1 Like
The other pain point we have with the taproom is returning kegs. If we want to clear out the empty keg pile at the end of the weekend, we might have 10 kegs to check in. It would be nice to have a bulk return feature that allows us to knock them all out a once.
1 Like
Why don’t you let taproom and brewery team work together? Let taproom staff be professional and place a forecasting order for the week and handle the rest as if it is an account you deliver to.
Our example. Our pub management orders via the tradestore at 100% discount (no costs) on their maintenance monday - order is picked and prepped during the week as if it was a delivery order (picks stock, scans kegs) and the pallet is moved to the taproom by our logistics/warehouse crew at a moment when there is a bit of time for them to stock. Taproom stocks it in their fridge and signs off the “delivery”. done and dusted.
Only problem emerges when a beer or storage space runs out. then it is as easy as an app with kegs and numbers and request to sales to make the order and allocate the keg numbers. but this is the exeption, not the rule
1 Like
We make it easy on ourselves. We have tried making locations and creating a past weeks sales order the following Monday but it was a nightmare to track kegs efficiently.
We now have our delivery driver make a collection every Monday when they stock the taproom and they do this again on Friday before the weekend. If our taproom needs stock of something while the brewing staff is gone we have them grab what they need before a shift or if theirs a weird run on a specific SKU and then they just message the Brewing team in our communication software with a picture of the keg barcode and amount of small pack. It works so well. If your taproom storage is too small to not have enough for an entire shift at its busiest then that is a separate problem all together. We are about to put a second taproom online and we will need to treat that like its own independent customer that buys beer from us so we have just treated our current taproom as its own customer as well. There are easy systems for this.
1 Like
I appreciate all the advice. We have a small section of the cold room dedicated to the taproom, so we can’t stock everything we need for the week–both kegs and cans–in that space. Bartenders check keg and can stock and reload as needed as part of their opening procedures. That helps it not be quite so time sensitive, but it still depends on our bartenders to remove the kegs from inventory. And of course sometimes we go though more of a specific beer than we expect, so we have to pull an extra keg on the fly.
1 Like
I always set this up so the Tap Room can ‘order’ beer from the warehouse through Breww. They can order more when needed, and return it if required. But generally all the flexibility is required over the weekend, so they just wait and only finalise their order at the end of trade to avoid returning things.
They can also reserve stock in the main warehouse without shipping it by committing it to an open order.
We end up with invoices in Xero of course, which we don’t want if we can avoid it because it’s a transfer of stock not a sale at that point. So we re-code the revenue to show cost of goods sold in the tap room, and cost of goods sold through wholesale. Which means you get accurate gross profit margin figures for each.
1 Like