QB Winery Solutions serves the financial needs of wineries using QuickBooks.

Of the 11,200 wineries in the United States, over 85% produce less than 10,000 cases each year. These are the Startups, the Limited Production, and the Very Small. These are the ones most in need of financial coaching. As it turns out, the majority of these wineries are also using QuickBooks.

We have courses on the best way to use QuickBooks for the wine industry, how to cost the wine, how to manage the financial side of the business, and much more.

 

QB Winery Solutions has on-demand courses with instant downloads for the DIY folks, group coaching for the social ones, and one-on-one consulting for those with urgent or challenging needs.

About You

You are probably wearing many hats. These job titles refer to tasks that you do, not necessarily individual people:

• Owner – you make decisions that affect the bottom line. We call this Financial Management. And it is not your favorite thing to do even if your day job used to be in the financial field. Making wine is so much more fun.
• Bookkeeper – you manage the day-to-day paperwork related to recording and paying bills from vendors, recording sales from customers, and handling the money.
• Tax Accountant – you prepare the tax return with numbers provided by the Bookkeeper following a tax strategy that you and the owner discussed.

Or  you might be one of these variations:

• The Reluctant Bookkeeper – this is the Owner, who is also doing the bookkeeping. Sometimes the business is too small to hand it off. Some of you use this task as a way to keep an eye on things. Some of you are too disorganized busy to hand it off.
• The Office Manager – this person sits in the Command Center of the winery and sees just about everything that goes on. No two days are alike, but you manage to fit in the bookkeeping between the compliance, website updates, phone calls, and the list goes on …
• The CFO – this is an adviser to the Owner, who helps with Financial Management. Unlike the Owner, the CFO thinks it is fun to crunch numbers. This type of accounting work is different than the tax type of accounting work, so the CFO-accountant and the Tax-accountant are rarely the same people. (Hint: the CFO is usually missing from the team.)

At QB Winery Solutions, we have accounting and bookkeeping tools, tips, and help for all of you.

However, our focus is on helping the Winery Owner and Office Manager, so we speak in plain English and try to keep the technical jargon to a minimum. But the wine industry is complicated, and it has some unique issues that, if not handled correctly, can lead to fatal decisions. So we have information for financial professionals who are new to the industry so that they can avoid these minefields.

Here are a few quick facts about Jeanette Tan:

• She ran her family’s French Restaurant for 10 years, so she has been in the trenches and knows what owners of small businesses go through each day. Thus she speaks English, although she can speak accounting-ese when interfacing with tax preparers and CPAs.
• She lived on Maui for 20 years, moving there as part of the management team that opened the Four Seasons Resort in Wailea. For some reason, she traded her free-room-night benefits for the madcap life of a freelance consultant.
• She became the go-to QuickBooks ProAdvisor on Maui and worked with businesses in almost every industry on the island. Thus, she became an expert at customizing QuickBooks for each company’s unique business processes.
• She was also a SCORE counselor and gave a QuickBooks class for the SBA and the Maui County Business Resource Center every other Monday for three years.
• In 2009, she moved to Sonoma County in search of better food and better schools. She had been flirting with the wine industry for years and was determined to finally transition her business to serve it. Jeanette thinks she was the only person living in Paradise who dreamed of living in Wine Country.
• She had one of the first wine bars in Los Angeles and featured over a dozen California wines by the glass. Jeanette held regular Dinners with the Winemaker (in the mid-’80s this was still a new thing).
• She once made a batch of barrel-fermented Chardonnay by chilling it in the restaurant’s walk-in – and won a blue ribbon at the local home winemaker’s club competition. Jeanette even took a leave of absence from the Four Seasons to work an entire harvest as a cellar rat for Dry Creek Vineyards (hey Larry & Phyllis, that was great fun!).
• Once in Wine Country, all she had to learn was how to cost the wine. For that she thanks Christine Bean, the Controller at KJ and Lance Spears of the Hoffman Group for pointing her in the right direction.

Jeanette is an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and is the only ProAdvisor working exclusively in the wine industry.  Small and boutique wineries are her specialty. She mostly works remotely but loves an excuse to work on-site. (Hey Australia, let’s talk!).

Call Jeanette at 707-634-7757 to discuss what tools, training, and support will help you stop worrying about the books so you can go back to worrying about that stuck fermentation.