Harvest is just around the corner, and soon after the grapes arrive, the grape bills arrive.

This is one of those steps that is only done once a year, so it is easy to forget how to handle them.

• Did you know that there is an easy way to track the number of tons you brought in?
• Do you know how to easily track and plan for multiple payments when the grower has given you generous payment terms?
• What is the right way to handle assessments?

If you are a winery owner, manager, staff, or accounting professional, I’d like to show you how to make your life easier by Tracking Grapes.

Silver Club members, this video is also in the Learning Library in the Mini-Course Hub.

Cheers! Jeanette

Harvest is here!! Grapes are rolling in!!!

To celebrate, I held our final summer webinar on how to handle the grapes, weight tags, assessments, and more. In these webinars, we usually discuss the Fundamental Five, which is our system for setting up QuickBooks so that you can use the information to increase the profitability of your winery. However, this time I talked for a full hour on a topic that will not help you become more profitable. Nope… nada … not one single useful profit tip.

Why did I do this? Because I am hoping to be a little less grouchy at year-end when it comes time to assemble the Costing Book. I love handling the costing process, but the part that takes me the longest is chasing down basic information about the grapes. Often I end up guessing which is not a good start to calculating the True Cost.

Part of the problem is that the growers rarely send a bill. (I actually send them a summary.) The other problem is that the winemaker usually tracks many of these details on an excel spreadsheet. That’s fine if they want to use excel to log the brix, additions, and other winemaking details. But by the end of crush, after countless long days and late-night punch-downs, the information about the number of tons, the cost per ton, and payment terms are less than complete at best. When I have to untangle the grape payments in QuickBooks and get them to match their excel spreadsheet, it never goes well.

The most efficient method is to record the weight tags in the accounting program because the weight tags are a source document. If we discover that the chicken-scratching that looked like “5” was really “7” it is easy to pinpoint the mistake and correct it. How about that load that was split with the neighbor? Making 1 barrel of wine from 1/2 ton of grapes costs the same as using 1 ton at half the cost per ton. I prefer to invoice the neighbor and get the right yield and cost per gallon.

Don’t get me going on the way the names change. The weight tag shows a vineyard and maybe a block name. But the check will be written to someone completely different. And the name of the bulk lot will usually be another name. Please, just give me the weight tag so I can sort this out.

If you want to make the person doing your costing less grumpy, please consider these steps when you enter your grape bills: 

• On the check or bill, enter each varietal on a separate row. Include the number of tons and the cost per ton in the description.
• Record the entire amount of the grapes purchased the year of harvest, regardless if you have terms and are paying for the grapes the following year. In the webinar, I showed 2 methods of handling the second payment. Pick the one you like the best.
• Record the assessments correctly. If you deduct this from the grape payment it is NOT a reduction in the cost of the grapes. 

In the webinar, I also showed several tips for wineries with larger production levels, thus more grapes and weight tags:

• Enter 1 bill for each weight tag.
• Combine the weight tags for each grower into the payment bills.
• Use the “item” tab with a non-inventory type item called “grape.” 
• Use Purchase Order to record the number of tons and the cost per ton that you plan on purchasing. Of course, Mother Nature is never going to deliver what is on the purchase order, but at least the cost per ton will be correct.
• Run the Open Purchase Order detail report several times in the middle of the season to see how many tons are left to bring in. This will help you stay within your budget (or it will help you know how much you need to increase your line of credit).

For the recording of the webinar, head to this page

If you follow these steps I guarantee that the person handling your costing will be less grumpy. And they might have some leftover brain cells to help you figure out a new way to increase the profitability of your winery.

We all know the wine industry is very generous and gives away as much as 15% of everything produced. That’s a lot of wine, and every drop of it should be tracked if you want to keep inventory reports accurate and monitor expenses for the samples.

Is your tasting room team pouring too much?

Where are you sending all of the wine?

If you are a winery owner, manager, staff, or accounting professional, I’d like to show you how to make your life easier by Tracking Sample Expenses.

Tracking the samples is so important that it is one of our Fundamental Five steps. During this video, you will learn some tips on tracking all of the samples, pours, and donations that you so generously give out.

Silver Club members, this video is also in the Learning Library in the Mini-Course Hub.

Cheers! Jeanette

Summer is here, and that means it’s bottling time!

If you are like most small wineries, you have one or two bottle runs each year, which costs a lot of money. Glass, labels, closures, and bottling labor – it all adds up.

With all that cost, some folks toss the invoices into a pile of paperwork and get to it later. Others do just the opposite: they enter the bills right away, but they enter way too much information. That does not help with the final costing.

There is a better solution…

If you are a winery owner, manager, staff, or accounting professional, I’d like to show you how to make your life easier, by showing you 3 Methods of Entering and Tracking Bottle Costs.

During this video, you will learn which one of our 3 methods is best for your winery. I’ll show you how you can tackle this as quickly as possible and get back to celebrating that delicious wine you bottled.

Silver Club members, this video is also in the Learning Library in the Mini-Course Hub.

Cheers! Jeanette

Are you going to continue to do Virtual Wine Tastings? For some of you, a Virtual Tasting is another customer service tool. Congratulations on adopting this technology and recognizing that everyone now knows how to Zoom.

But if you sell a tasting kit paired with a presentation, consider creating a channel for this activity. Many wineries have lumped the sales from these tastings with their Website or Online sales. If you do that, you are missing out on some critical metrics.

Even if most of your sales are in the DTC channel, you still want to monitor the revenue among your DTC sales channels because each channel requires a different marketing strategy to generate a sale. What are your marketing programs for each DTC sales channel?

• Tasting Room – Outreach in the community; A good sign on the highway
• Wine Club – Conversion of tasting room guests
• Website – Email campaigns
• Virtual Tastings – Google or FaceBook ads

There are as many different strategies as there are wineries. Sure, there is some crossover … someone saw a Virtual Tasting ad and ended up driving to the tasting room instead. Or a Somm recommended your wine, and they immediately signed up for your Club. You may never know all of the moving parts, but the top-line revenue of these classes gives you feedback on how successful your marketing activities have been.

The Virtual Tasting channel is essentially a customer acquisition activity. However, your team needs a different skill set. They need a different kind of bubbly presence. And you will need some new equipment or even a dedicated corner of the winery. Maybe you need to hire a consultant with a background in YouTube marketing.

I recommend that you create Virtual Tasting kits that are different from other bundles that you sell. Record the sales of these kits in the Virtual Class. Yes, these are all likely to come through the website, so you will have to do an extra step to identify them. If you are a Silver Club member, give me a holler in the Forum, and I will walk you through those steps.

As usual, I don’t recommend that you class the expenses for the Virtual channel, but you could if you wanted to. (As a disclaimer, I never said: “don’t class expenses.” I only said, “don’t think that you have to class expenses”).

I think that Virtual Tastings were one of the fantastic new things that started during the Shut Down (almost as good as the bread baking renaissance). I predict that many wineries will latch onto this new sales channel and become a vital tool for their growth and success.

Have you ever started your bank reconciliation and found that the beginning balance is off? Turns out there is an easy fix. Check out this Quickie.

Here is a quickie to show you what this looks like (Silver Club members please log in to view)

This is one of those random procedures that, hopefully, you only have to do once. The scenario is that you rebottled some magnums into 750s.

The trick is to use a Journal Entry check similar to what you use when you record a bottle run. Enter what was unbottled as a negative number, and then the final amount you made in this process. It is likely that you had some spillage and sipage, and it is likely that there will be a cost difference. Record this different on the expenses tab, using the Inventory Adj account. Enter either a positive or negative number so that you have a zero dollar check.

Here is a video to show you the steps