So I got 3 boxes of wine today … 15 Arista Pinots (5 diff labels), and a case of Di Costanzo (6 Chard, 6 Pinot).
I searched “2021 Arista” and then opened up the 5 wines I got in new tabs. Then I did the same thing for “2021 Di Constanzo.” From each product page, I hit add wine, logged quantity and location, then save, then close the tab. So I entered all the wines in about 2-3 mins — so far so good.
But then when I go to print barcode labels, I hit my cellar and - to my surprise - there’s no way to actually sort it by date added. I had to re-search for each wine, go to the product page, and then hit print.
I guess I could’ve skipped closing the tab, navigated back to the product page after saving and then hit print. That’s only a few extra clicks (however in my case my computer wasn’t plugged into my label printer when I was adding wines). But it still feels a little clunky having to print labels cuvée by cuvée. It would be seriously more efficient to check off boxes of multiple cuvées then hit print at the top of the page.
Assuming I logged these wines when I bought them, though, I would’ve been in even worse shape. If I just hit my pending delivery tab, checked off wines that arrived, then hit accept delivery, all those wines are now lost in “my cellar” with no way to sort by delivery date. So now I have to hope my shipments have printed packing lists, then I have to search one by one?
That’s somewhat helpful in that it allows me to print only un-printed barcodes. But I actually have a lot of unprinted barcodes for wine stored at 2 different off sites. I could just bite the bullet and print them one time, I guess…
You can filter to a specific location and then print. That is highly encouraged so that you don’t have labels from multiple sites mixed up with each other.
You can add the same wine, multiple times, from multiple stores. So sorting your “wines” by date added is not possible in the WINES view. However in the INDIVIDUAL BOTTLE view you can absolutely sort by date added. That is why we have a big toggle right at the top of the screen.
Personally, my workflow is to add all the wines to CT and/or unpack a case at a time and accept them from pending deliveries. I print the barcodes from the unprinted (in a separate window). Then I scan the bottles and scan my bin (which I have physically barcoded).
When I enter the wines, I put them in a “Pending” location. Once I’ve entered all the wines, I can go to the “Pending” location, print all the barcodes, stick them to the bottles, and then start figuring out where the wines will go. As I find where in the racking the wine will go, I update the location in CellarTracker from “Pending” to “Cellar” and update the bin to the appropriate value.
That also lets me break the effort up, so I don’t spend 4 hrs in the cellar putting things away (like after a trip to Walla Walla). I can log all the wines and print the barcodes, then come back the next day and shuffle stuff around to put things away.
I have the same issue with multiple offsites, so what I do is click the main print button on my cellar, choose CSV and print. Doesn’t use any actual labels, but it clears out the unprinted queue so I can add the new wines and go back to print and actually print just the new ones.
That’s my exact setup and process as well. I add everything when purchased so when the box shows up I accept from pending in most cases. Splits up the work so when I have 5 cases land I don’t have to spend a bunch of time entering all the wines and printing and labeling and putting them away at the same time.
When a shipment arrives, I usually just put it (still in the box) into the cellar until I have time to deal with it (and during peak season I usually wait until enough has accumulated to handle them all at once).
Then on the day that I’m going to put them away, I open each box, check to see if it’s already in CT (I’m pretty inconsistent about entering pending deliveries), and if it’s not, enter it. Then mark everything in that box as received, into a special location I call “TEMP-RECV.”
Once I’ve opened every box and entered every bottle, I print labels for everything in TEMP-RECV, and apply them to the bottles. Then I grab my barcode scanner, take (usually) one bottle at a time, scan it, scan the location barcode to move it into my home cellar location, find an empty slot, and scan the bin barcode. Clear and repeat.
If I’m doing a ton at once, sometimes I will download a CSV from CT to help me find empty bins (since they’re scattered throughout the cellar), and I’ll also use this as a chance to do some sanity checks (like make sure not bins/slots are showing more bottles than they can physically hold).
If it’s just a small amount (one shipment, or a couple of small ones) I don’t always bother with the barcode scanner, and I’ll just update the locations manually. But when I’m stowing a lot, the scanners saves a lot of time (though I do wish there was a way to have it automatically clear once I have scanned the bin barcode, and a way to combine location + bin in one barcode. So instead of scanning: bottle, location, bin, clear; I could scan: bottle; location+bin+clear).
That’s the biggest challenge. So often I forget to clear and then scan more bottles and then a new bin and have to go back and redo the last batch of bottles.
It’s also difficult that the scanner beeps when the barcode is read, but that doesn’t mean it was read correctly and CT found the bottle. So I scan 6 bottles and then figure out only 5 were picked up and have to figure out which bottle was missed or scan all 6 again.
Overall, it’s a good system, but they’re certainly are some enhancements that would make a huge difference for power use when I’m inventorying 10 cases of wine.
Yes, I have the clear barcode and the location barcode printed out big, so I can scan them from a distance. But it still slows me down quite a bit and sometimes I forget and end up with things in the wrong bin.
@Eric_LeVine well - just found out location barcodes exist - that‘s super helpful! However, when I try to print them I get “try to increase width” on the label printouts. What does that mean?
A relatively simple addition to the system could be to support BC_A01 style codes just like L, B or C. This would assign the bin and clear the list. I would have to reprint and restick all my bin barcodes, but that’s life.
However, if I may be so bold, a slightly more complex addition, but huge for power users would be adding an option for a sound when scanning a barcode and the page reloads. If the bottle is found or the location or bin is assigned, a success chirp. If there is an error displayed instead, an error sound. That would be so huge because my computer is across the room and I have to turn around to see if the bottles were scanned and then turn around again to make sure the location and bin took.
Alas, one of the major failure cases are two scans done too quickly, so one gets lost. So we could make a gong sound on a scan that doesn’t find a result, but we can’t catch the double-scan easily.
If there’s ever any thought about extending the “special” barcode support, I’d beg for something that encodes the location and bin in the same barcode (and if it can also encode an optional “clear,” even better). Obviously that risks having some pretty long barcodes if people have long location and bin names (mine are each 4 characters), but with QR I think it would be ok. I’ve thought about other solutions to this, like being able to configure associations between bins and locations or configuring a default location for bin scans, but encoding it in the barcode seems the most flexible.
There’s no better form of procrastination than “solving” problems in other peoples’ software, where you don’t have to think about the complexities that are surely involved, nor do you have to worry about prioritization
Sorry, the tag I put in the last post got stripped. The HTML5 <audio> tag is well supported now and you can put two of them on the page and trigger the right one to play on load with JS.
Also, the double scan is only a problem because you can’t really tell when the page is loaded. So with the sound, you’d wait until you hear the success sound before scanning again. That’s the big reason I mentioned adding the success chirp in addition to the error gong.
Andrew, fair point on just looking at adding a success noise AND a gong nose when a scan yields an error (e.g. you accidentally scanned the UPC or a bottle that was already consumed or was not found since you missed part of the barcode etc.)
One thing I have experienced a few times is when I find a bottle in the cellar and realize that I entered it under the wrong vintage. As it is now, it seems I have to delete that bottle, add a new bottle copying over all of the purchase details manually and then print a new barcode. It would be really nice to be able to edit that bottle or the entire purchase entry and move it all to the correct vintage while keeping the barcode number the same since it’s already on the bottle.
