I am a CT delinquent.

Every time we bring home wine, Steve and I sit down at the computer and dutifully enter each bottle into CT. We carefully track not only the wine, but where we bought it and what we spent. Then every time we consume a bottle, we remove it from our CT inventory and post notes.

In theory.

In practice, there are many bottles in our CT inventory that we’ve consumed or given away, and God knows how many bottles in the house and storage locker that we never entered. We love CT, and consider it an indispensible tool, yet we seem to lack the discipline to use it consistently. Are we unusual in this respect? If you use CT (or some other cellar management software) how accurate is your inventory at any given time?

A follow-up question. If you don’t use cellar management software consistently, why? Do you use it exclusively for higher end or age-worthy wines, and leave out short term drinkers?

Cellar Tracker threads are not allowed.

I am pretty diligent with my CT and my inventory is probably 95% accurate at any given time. Most of my wines that get consumed will get a note. It might just be a few words or quick impressions but every wine has something. It might take me a day or two to post the consumption but I get to it eventually. There have been times when I have caught bottles in my inventory list that were drank months ago. I also try to do an inventory every year or so. This can get tricky to do for a whole cellar but I section wines that I know I will not be touching for 5+ years into specific bins. This helps so I dont have to inventory my whole cellar; cuts the work in about half. It does get tricky though as I do not have racking. In between my three locations it is OWC’s, styro, cardboard boxes and my wine fridge.

I am also not the one to inventory daily drinkers as that just gets tiresome. Most of my wine purchases for stuff worth cellaring are online, so once purchased it is right over to CT for tracking.

I honestly dont know what I would do without CT, it makes wine organization so much easier.

I use it and I love it. But a while ago I moved and re-arranged my entire cellar (~100 cases at the time). Not a lot of wine by some standards, but looking at how many clicks are involved in updating the location field vs. how many wines I have, it took me a year to (admittedly lazily) get caught up on location updating. And it’s still not quite there, wines are sometimes hard to find.

Other than the woefully out of date and still incomplete location info in CT I bet I’m not off by more than 5-10 bottles that are either not in inventory but are in the cellar, or have been drunk but not removed from inventory.

Overall CT is awesome. Most of it’s limitations are really HTML / web limitations, and are limited to speed, I sometimes wish I had raw SQL access and / or a local client front end, just to get around the html speed / multi-click issues, when I’m trying to audit / inventory / mass update stuff.

I’m very anal about it. An inventory/audit function would be nice…

My CT is no more disorganized than my actual cellar itself, so I have no complaints with respect to the software. As you suggested in your follow-up question, I don’t bother using it for everyday drinkers, so according to CT I don’t have any Loire or Italian whites, villages chablis or barbera & nebbiolo langhe, even though I have several racks of these wines at any given point in time. And I do “discover” wines every once in a while that I thought were already consumed, but all-in I think it’s reasonably accurate.

I’m also extremely anal. I try to capture everything and when I don’t I go into the cellar and make corrections.

You should move to Dana Point, broseif. Calms down the type A…

I have a Vinotemp unit in the house so CT keeps me organized. The reporting function one can run from the system is what I hang on the cellar handle so when I pull a bottle, I just cross it off the list and edit to the database later. Actually, I ran a report with my morning espresso yesterday and updated my inventory, too. It’s a great database. With the same unit, each slot only can hold two bottles so I always know that if I have 3 bottles in a slot, I forgot to ‘consume’ a bottle of my inventory. [oops.gif]

Like Phillip, I am pretty detailed so CT fits into that obsession. But, without CT, I would be sky-rood. Thank god it exists.

And, I keep making sure that I buy more and more wine that Whetstone hates so when he comes over and looks at my CT report, and I ask him what he wants to drink, he can’t find anything. [rofl.gif] [basic-smile.gif]

My CT is waaaay off right now. We were in the middle of inventorying to get it all up to snuff, but a certain something happened to my back in the process. [cry.gif]

I imagine at this point it is only 60-70% correct. We’ve been really awful lately and haven’t removed anything from inventory when we drink. I guess when you know it is not 100%, it is hard to keep up with it and decide that it doesn’t really matter. Another reason why it is so hard for me, is that I do a lot of this in my job and it is hard to motivate myself to do it for my own cellar.

I’d love to get it to 100%, but I suspect it will never get there unless I do the scanner.

I’m bad as well. While I’m 100% accurate as to the contents of my offsite storage, I haven’t dealt with consumption for the in home storage in quite a while. I’m patiently drinking it all so that I must just delete it all…except the the 99 Lafite and 01 Guiraud…which my wife would kill me if I drank prior to our 10th anniv.

i stopped entering data 3 years ago (never got close to finishing) so you could say it is off a bit. it’s an amazing tool i just don’t need it for my particular style of collecting and consumption.

For me THE lifesaver is barcoding every bottle. Out of more than 6000 bottles I have found one discrepancy in 6+ years, and the barcoding is the reason.

  1. Download your cellar to Excel using these instructions: Exporting Data - CellarTracker Support" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
  2. On the INDIVIDUAL BOTTLES tab feel free to manually update the LOCATION and BIN fields. Do not add or remove rows. Do NOT remove the BARCODE column.
  3. Mail me the sheet, and I will bulk update all of your locations and bins using the sheet (and based on the BARCODE id for each bottle).

When I am done with my site upgrade my goal is to make it a LOT easier for you to do updates in bulk. I know the UI is cumbersome right now for some of these tasks.

Yes, there will be one.

And of course I should add, thank you all for both the kind words and the fair feedback/criticism. I know that keeping an inventory can be a chore, and I know that I have more to do in order to have a more productive user interface. I am just deeply thankful to have so many supportive and patient customers.

I’m very close to 100% after I inventoried my 110 bottles. neener

I’m pretty good about it. I’ve got 565 bottles in inventory, and I’m guessing < 10 are out of date.

Pretty accurate.
I generally keep all new purchases in their cartons UNTIL they’ve been entered into CT. Then, and only then, do I put each bottle into its final destination bin/slot. So when boxes begin to pile up in the cellar, that’s a powerful incentive to get to work. I’d say they never sit more than a week or two before they get entered.

Outbound is a different story. I really try to relieve inventory the morning after, but you know how that can go. I usually put the empties in my office, to remind me to do it. Again, they may sit for a few days before this gets done. Soon, my office begins to look like the Bowery.

Even with this routine, I often find a stray bottle or two that shouldn’t be there, or search in vain for one that ought to be there, but isn’t.

In my case, it’s pure operator laziness and not any sort of CT shortcoming.

We’ve never considered barcodes because we just don’t buy that much wine. We estimated tonight that we buy no more than 200 bottles a year, and keep maybe 500 or so (Steve? does that sound right) in our locker.

I’m curious, for people who do use barcodes, what was the tipping point at which you decided you had a large enough cellar to warrant that level of organization?