How do you know if it’s time for your brewery to invest in a financial system?
According to the Brewer’s Association, craft beer production was up 16% midway through 2015. Many craft breweries are currently experiencing a period of rapid growth. Having a solid business foundation is the first step toward managing your growth and giving you the tools you need to keep up with industry demands. Your financial system should be able to track your brewing process, measure your profitability, and give you visibility into your production scheduling. There are a number of reasons why your brewery could benefit from an integrated production and financial system. Our existing brewery customers encountered several growing pains during their different stages of success, perhaps you are experiencing these situations too?
- You’re noticing that your brewery is outgrowing its current process – most breweries start small, and as they build their brand and increase their market share, they begin to face challenges attributed to their new success. As your production increases, it’s really important to accurately track and manage your brewing process. Do you have the right tools to handle lot tracking and quality control?
- You’ve been using an entry-level accounting system for a long period of time – now that you’ve been in business for a number of years, your production is steady and your supply meets the demand. Sure, your entry-level accounting system allows you to perform daily tasks, but is it giving you the insight you need to manage your brewing process? In many cases, we see breweries manually tracking their expenses, ordering, recipe manufacturing, and COGS by material. Your staff’s time is valuable. Wouldn’t it be easier to automate your processes, so that your staff can focus on your brewery’s high priority issues?
- You don’t have access to your data in real time – your current method of manually tracking your data doesn’t give you immediate visibility into the various aspects of your brewing process. Many breweries are manually scheduling their production using brew sheets, white boards, and Excel. Being able to track your brewing process step by step would allow your team to make key decisions that will increase revenue and cut costs. Would you rather have an integrated production and financial system that would give you the ability to perform real time data analysis, rather than performing analysis on a monthly or quarterly basis?
If you are currently experiencing these situations or see them on the horizon, it’s probably time to start investigating an upgrade of your financial & production software. Tidestone Solutions implements an out-of-the-box brewery specific software solution called VicinityBrew integrated with Microsoft Dynamics GP to automate business processes for breweries. We’d love to share how we’ve enhanced processes for brewery clients like Allagash, Victory, & Highland Brewing. Contact Patrick Murray to learn more: pmurray@tidestonesolutions.com or 207-956-6635.
