running a brewery
running a brewery

Running a Brewery on the Cloud

Once you’ve perfected your recipes, one of the best (and most commonly overlooked) projects you can take on to set up your craft brewery for success is to automate your accounting processes. Running a brewery with cloud accounting will enable you to focus on what you do best—keep customers coming back for more. Below are some of the top accounting processes that successful craft brewers automate to save time and money. 

Point-of-sale

When you’re ready to ring up orders or close a tab, you need a user friendly point-of-sale system on your side. Square is our top pick for breweries due to its ease of use, enhanced customer features, and ability to integrate with brewery-specific inventory software. A point-of-sale system like Square is more than just a way to receive payments from your customers. Square’s customer-focused benefits, such as messaging and loyalty programs, enhance your visitors’ experience. Having a happy hour, just launched a new brew, or celebrating a five year anniversary? Quickly compose a text message notifying your customers of the event and send it out to everyone who has opted in to receive updates. You can also request reviews and collect anonymous feedback. 

Payroll

Chances are you have at least a few employees helping you run your business. Manually keeping track of employee hours, benefits, and payroll taxes is a major, unnecessary time suck. Further, a missed payroll tax payment could be a financially painful mistake. Square Payroll is a choice app for breweries that are already using Square for their point-of-sale system. Square automates the payroll process right along with your point-of-sale, making the entire payroll process more straightforward for you and your employees. Your staff can clock in and out right from the bar, and Square can also automatically track and import tips.

Processing bills and payments (Accounts Payable)

As with any business, there will always be bills to pay. While automating bill pay may sound intimidating, it’s actually a way to add more security and reliability to your payments. First, eliminating the need to manually enter bills or send reminders saves valuable time. Breweries will incur many costs, including different vendors for ingredients, supplies, and materials. Having all bills in one organized, secure hub simplifies the process of approving and paying each vendor, on time. Automating those payments doesn’t mean you don’t know what’s going out each month—actually, it’s the opposite. As the business owner, you set up approval processes to ensure that you, or another authorized employee, has eyes on every payment. We love Bill.com for its time-saving features, but also because it adds invaluable layers of security to every transaction.

Brewery inventory management

Inventory is always flowing at breweries, oftentimes making it a challenge to stay up to date. From the product itself to labels, bottles, crates, and all of the ingredients, it’s important to always have a real-time picture of what you have on hand and what needs to be ordered. Cloud-based inventory management apps simplify the process, and provide business owners with a real-time picture, accessible from anywhere at any time.

Let the cloud-based accounting apps do the back office work for you, giving you time back to focus on your craft. We have worked with successful breweries to optimize their back office functions and streamline their accounting processes, making sure they can focus on the reason they started running a brewery in the first place. If you’re just finalizing your recipe or celebrating the brewery’s expansion, we would be happy to find a solution fit for your needs. Contact us to set up a consultation.

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