What was once a dream shared between you and your college buddies, finally turned into reality. Yes, that’s right: you opened your own craft beer establishment. Semi-hipster haircuts: check. Newsboy cap and beards: check. Universal love for quality craft beer brewed in small batches: check! And before you knew it, you were off to the races, working as hard as you possibly could to build a strong and loyal following.
After all, you wanted your heavenly batches of malted barley, hops and yeast to remain small, while your loyal following of customers to be anything but. And somehow, with a little trial and error (and a lot of late nights taste-testing, no doubt), you took a few kegs of heaven and turned them into the best and latest craft beer brewery, beer house, brew pub around. Cheers!
Chances are, you silently hoped that your small, but charming establishment would magically evolve into three or five or more locations. It wasn’t so far-fetched or out of the question to think that it could happen. Logically speaking, it made sense: you created a solid product that only grew in demand by a loyal and yes, growing customer base. What was once a single 1,000 square foot brew pub with a 12-foot bar and a few picnic tables, turned into slightly more than a handful of Brew Pubs that graced the skylines of your metropolitan landscape.
"The craft brew industry collectively produced 25.9 million barrels in 2018, representing a 4% growth over 2017, as well as a 13.2% market share volume growth" notes Thomas Pellechia contributor in Forbes. "In retail dollars, the craft breweries racked up about $27.6 billion in 2018 (7% growth over 2017), with a 24.1% market share in value."
Related: Brewery News for 2020!
More pints, more problems
Yes, faster than you could spell I-P-A, your craft beer empire had taken off and expanded. In fact, you’ve grown from dotting a few neighborhoods in your local metropolitan area to covering all adjacent counties, and even a few across state lines. But you also encountered more than your share of financial and accounting reporting headaches. Tracking and managing inventory, trying to stay on top of periodic financial reporting (for each location), all while overseeing a growing business, proved to be more than what your trusty entry level accounting software could handle. Sure, you thought you were ahead of the curve when you sprang for QuickBooks, thinking it’d be more than you’d ever need. Since then, you’ve found a few glitches, and they seem to occur with increasing frequency. Are you…
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struggling to produce solid reports based on reliable, accurate data? Login and out of databases to produce month-end Financial Statements is tedious and time consuming. And how accurate is your data?
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taking longer to produce standard (revenue forecasts, profit and loss), periodic (weekly, monthly, quarterly) reports? What about consolidated financials? By the time you get them, are they five days old?
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experiencing difficulty accurately tracking and calculating vendor and maintenance expenses from one location to another? Sure, you might think a pint is a pint, and a keg is a keg, but that new location out in Lansing might be having a deal complete with capital discounts and special pricing for the whole month. Or, your flagship brew pub in Detroit might be the first of your brew houses to undergo a renovation, and you’ve already made partial down payments on materials to secure a better deal. How’s that being recorded?
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struggling to track inventory and shipments (direct from vendor to brewery, or from warehouse to pub)? Unlike the big box beer companies (complete with Clydesdale logo), ACME Brew Pub prides itself on the fact that each brew house has its own signature brew. So, between each location, not all beer inventory is interchangeable. For those batches that you bottle up and share with your fellow ABP locales, tracking inventory is crucial. Are those inventory transfers being (properly and accurately) recorded?
A streamlined brew pub operation means more time to concentrate on teaching the perfect pour
If any of those scenarios sound familiar, then you’re spending too much time trying to catch up with operations, when you should be thinking of the next best way to serve up what Yelp reviews are calling a true home for beer enthusiasts. Maybe it’s time to embrace an upgrade to a proactive system that grows with you. Built on the Microsoft Power Platform (aka Dynamics 365), Gravity Software® (Gravity) provides a tailored adaptation for your brew pub chain with a clear, 360-degree view of every location, anytime.
If you’re still relying on QuickBooks you’re probably having to log in to each database for each location, every time. What if you could have all your legal entities on one database, and just one platform? When your company’s data is consolidated in one accessible location, you can (with proper security features in place) navigate from one location to the next without wasting precious time.
Gravity can really go to work by…
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drilling down and extracting any/all relevant data, for any location/ entity. No more frantic emails to each location, requesting confirmation of an inventory transfer.
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sharing master files. With proper security features in place, you can share data with all of your locations’ general managers, but perhaps not their assistant GM’s. It's up to you.
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reporting on consolidated information. Track and breakdown vendor expenses by location. Now you can compare one location to another, side by side, without embarking from one information silo to another. Go ahead, see which location is serving up more pints and which flavors are in.
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capturing and analyzing critical data, like overhead expenses by location. Which brew house spent money fixing line equipment? Who ordered new pub tables? Who spent a little more on product last month because of the Jax and Tara wedding? Or, you just got a huge invoice for carpentry and plumbing work for your newest location in Ferndale? No worries, you have all contracts, purchase orders and invoices, all together. So, you’re able to sign off and approve payment, knowing everything lines up.
Gravity can centralize the operations for brew house locations into one database while still providing detailed and customized reporting for each locale. Schedule your online demo with Gravity today! My business is connected. Is yours?
Gravity Software
Better. Smarter. Accounting.
This article was originally published in November of 2017 and has been updated and edited for clarity.