Anything better than quickbooks for smallscale startup ?
Looking acct, inc management. Eventually will want online and retail sales. Wine club code can interface.
I’ve used QB successfully for winery accounting for over 10 years.
As we are only open 4 days a week, instead of importing sales data from the POS computer, I ran a daily (or weekend) sales report from POS, and then input just the totals by hand. It only takes a few minutes. This keeps the daily TR sales much cleaner and briefer in the overall accounting program.
You will want sub-items for each storage location (tasting room inventory, winery case goods, offsite storage) and 2 item codes for each - cases and bottles.
Good luck!
For online sales you’ll want commerce software that can export transactions to QB/accounting software and most will do so in either QB format or delimited text (comma separated usually). Things to consider at that point are whether a one way export is enough or do you want to sync things like inventory and whether you host the commerce package or outsource it. in general, online sales are simple, but the insanity of various states’ shipping and reporting requirements makes online wine sales a more involved proposition.
Appreciate the inputs, we are a year or more from sales, so I have some time to get it right. currently working on assets and bill of materials for cost of goods sold to support 09 tax loss.
It seems with some care, I can classify the component “assemblies” of a barrel back to grapes, yeasts and fermentation aids, and project inventory out in cs and bottles based on yields.
We will have all three of Estate grapes, purchased grapes and purchased bulk, (good change we may also have purchased bottles).
S
I just started a small winery with 200 cases in 2006, 400 cases in 2007, and 1500 cases not yet bottled for 2008 & 2009 vintages.
I started using Quickbooks 2 years ago (a little bit after I started). I highly recommend upgrading from the basic version. You can create your own expense categories which is very important in the wine biz. For instance, I have 7 different varieties in 2009, I created my own expense categories (09NVCS (2009 Napa Cab), 09DCZN (2009 Dry Creek Zin), etc.), and whenever there is a direct cost associated with that particular wine, barrels, harvest, bottling costs, etc., I dedicate it that expense. Once the wine is bottled, I have a pretty accurate cost basis.
It is also great for printing checks.
Once you start making sales, you can process credit cards with it, but you would need to sign up with another company if you want to do secure sales over the internet. The secure shopping cart software I use allows me to export Quickbook files for record-keeping.
Good luck in your venture!
I bought the Premium package for “manufacturing”…
Perfect choice.
Remember, items, items, items. If you use just income and expenses you lose the most valuable reporting tools.
Um, thats why I am building assemblies that start at grapes with subs of purchased/estate, and progress through fermentation supplies etc.
Not quite ready to take it back to vines & acres yet (only have 100 vines at moment)
Not quite sure how to deal with barrels of variable life expectancy, I suppose I could define them
as classes, based on expected years and then expense them linearly, instead of depreciating, treating them as a consumable.
It is always interesting to read the IRS’ own training materials regarding audits of wineries.
These materials are often very helpful in determining what items you, as a manufacturer, get to expense and what items you must capitalize.
Wow… thats great to see before I am trying to read it upside down across a desk in a government office building.