TL;DR: The duty is only due when the beer (delivery) leaves the brewery.
We have a report to explain “missing” items - find this by going to the return in question, then using the Beer duty breakdown button in the top-right, followed by the What’s not on my return and why? button.
Keep reading for more information…
Breww only reports duty on the actual movement of beer out of your duty suspense threshold. This can be achieved using the big Mark as dispatched button either on the individual delivery/collection or in bulk when managing a particular day’s deliveries in the Deliveries screen.
This is the most cash-flow efficient way of calculating duty, however, it is more complicated to keep track of versus simply counting the sales… but don’t worry, Breww handles all of this for you behind the scenes.
As the duty only becomes due at the point the beer leaves the brewery (even if paid for before then), the duty is always added to the current in-progress duty return and is never retrospectively added to a historical return. For this reason, it’s important to use the Mark as dispatched button at the time the beer/vehicle leaves the brewery. If the delivery subsequently fails and the beer is returned, the duty is strictly still due, but Breww will keep track of this and when the same container of beer is delivered on another order the duty won’t be paid again. Likewise, if the beer is lost/spoilt, enter this into Breww as an ullage and we’ll sort out the duty for you. If this happens during the same month, the duty will never be paid, and if it happens after, we’ll automatically add a reclaim for you.
If you need to account for additional duty payable for previous months, especially in the first month that you swap from using another duty calculation method to using Breww’s, you can make positive or negative adjustments on your return. Adding these to Breww as well as the HMRC documents ensures that Breww’s total always matches HMRC’s total, there’s full audibility and this will make your life much easier when explaining this in a tax inspection from HMRC. You can simply hand them access to your Breww duty section and let them look at all the detail they need to pass you with flying colours!