Running a successful winery requires much more than cultivating vineyards and making quality wines. You must also manage other processes, such as vendor management, sales order fulfillment, inventory management, etc.
Therefore, you require the right technological tools to handle such a complex business. QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is an ERP solution that can help you improve profitability in the competitive wine market. According to the Ekos report, 9 out of 10 breweries and cideries use Intuit QuickBooks for bookkeeping and accounting.
Intuit offers four subscription models: Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. You can choose the best QuickBooks Enterprise plan for your business requirements.
In this article…
Let’s explore the top features:
1. Advanced Inventory Management
An environment like wineries calls for proper inventory management. They must always closely track their raw materials, work-in-progress (WIP), and finished products.
Advanced Inventory feature allows you to track inventory from multiple locations. This feature encompasses all the critical tasks you need to manage your winery’s inventory. These include –
- Serial/Lot Number Tracking: You can add serial numbers to each item or lot number to a batch. This enables you to map a bill directly to the item.
- Barcodes – You can create barcodes in QuickBooks Enterprise or import barcodes from Excel. The barcodes can then be assigned to the items and scanned for efficient tracking.
- FIFO – By activating FIFO, you can ensure that items can follow the first in, first out rule.
- Pick, Pack, and Ship: The picking, packing, and shipping of barrels and bottles is done promptly, as all the pickers and packers can coordinate on a single platform.
When a winery manages an inventory, it must manage various vintages, varieties, and blends. QuickBooks Enterprise makes it easy for them by offering powerful classification tools: wineries can classify their inventory by production stage, type, or warehouse location. This ensures smooth coordination between production and sales, which leads to customer satisfaction and efficiency.
2. Advanced Reporting
QuickBooks Enterprise Solution offers 200+ custom reports catering to the winery’s unique needs. They can track production costs by batch and compare sales by product, client, or region. It also provides Profit and Loss (P&L) statements and network balance sheets.
By offering tailor-made insights, QBES empowers wineries to recognize which wine sells the most, customer trends, and region-wise sales. For example, a winery may find that a particular vintage consistently underperforms in one market, allowing it to channel resources more profitably elsewhere.
Such detailed reporting empowers wineries to make decisions based on concrete data, ensuring economic growth and sustainable development. Advanced Reporting feature also allows you to create reports based on the business’s specific needs. It is available in all versions of QB Enterprise.
3. Labor Costs and Project Monitoring
Winemaking entails managing numerous projects concurrently, such as planting new vineyards, starting a new vintage, or building new facilities. QuickBooks Enterprise simplifies job costs by enabling wineries to manage labor, materials, and overhead expenses for particular projects. It also allows wineries to monitor expenditures against budgets. Moreover, profitability reports can be broken down by job or project.
Such detailed financial tracking is critical for wineries, where project costs can vary dramatically because of factors like weather conditions and grape quality. By keeping a real-time check on costs, wineries can stay within their budget, use resources more efficiently, and make sure every project is profitable.
4. Sales Order Management
Smooth handling of sales orders is critical for wineries, especially during peak season or special events such as wine festivals and tastings.
QuickBooks Enterprise’s sales order fulfillment worksheet provides tools to track orders from multiple sales channels, monitor pending, fulfilled, or partial orders, and prioritize orders based on delivery deadlines.
With the Order Management feature, you can meet customer demand without delay, curbing the chances of canceled orders. Furthermore, the software helps coordinate with shipping providers to streamline delivery, ensuring that goods arrive to customers in top condition.
5. Industry-Specific Chart of Accounts
With QuickBooks Enterprise, you get a “chart of accounts” dashboard that is customizable to meet your business’s specific needs. You can change or add as many fields and filters as required and change the view to flat or hierarchical.
Having an industry-specific chart of accounts ensures that all financial transactions are accurately recorded and categorized. This is particularly important for wineries, where production and sales costs can vary significantly depending on factors like grape varietals, aging processes, and marketing strategies.
6. Multi-Location Inventory Tracking
Wineries generally have multiple locations, such as vineyards, production facilities, and tasting rooms. Therefore, managing and tracking inventory might be challenging.
QuickBooks Enterprise‘s multi-location tracking allows wineries to monitor stock levels across several sites, transfer back and forth based on need, and track real-time inventory status.
This is particularly valuable for wineries, as sales occur in separate channels, such as wholesale, retail, and online. By providing a centralized view of inventory, QuickBooks Enterprise empowers the wineries to meet customer demands easily. It also ensures that no inventory gets overstocked while the other is understocked.
Moreover, QB Enterprise increases the overall operational efficiency by ensuring better collaboration between teams in different departments.
7. Robust User Permissions
Wineries usually have diverse teams, including vineyard workers, production staff, sales representatives, and accountants. With QuickBooks Enterprise, admins can assign users roles and permissions based on their responsibilities and work profiles. This ensures that critical data is exposed to only authorized personnel.
QuickBooks Enterprise offers 15 pre-defined user roles, such as View-Only, Admin, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, etc. However, you can also create custom roles or edit a current one. QBES also allows you to modify, create, or delete user permissions.
For instance, you might give salespeople access to customer and order information only but allow accountants to access financial reports and tax filings. This level of control leads to not only enhanced security but also smoother collaboration.
8. Integration with Third-Party Apps
Besides QuickBooks Enterprise, wineries need other tools to create an all–in–one ecosystem. It seamlessly integrates with many third-party QuickBooks apps specifically built for wineries.
For instance, QuickBooks Enterprise integrates with e-commerce platforms like Amazon, WooCommerce, and Shopify to help you with online sales.
9. Scalability for Growing Wineries
When wineries start to grow, their operational requirements become more complex. QuickBooks Enterprise is designed for businesses like yours: it can accommodate up to 40 simultaneous users, manage larger data files without bogging down in performance, and provide features such as advanced pricing and payroll functions.
The software’s scalable nature means you can continue using it as your business expands, thus avoiding expensive system migrations. Whether opening new vineyards, adding tasting rooms, or exploring new markets, QuickBooks Enterprise provides the tools and flexibility needed for expansion.
10. Data Security
The security of financial data is imperative for all wineries. QuickBooks Enterprise safeguards your confidential customer and vendor data with advanced security features. These include –
- Audit Trail: You can track each user’s activity in QuickBooks Enterprise. This allows you to recognize the user in case of a security event.
- Closing Password: This feature lets admins set an expiry date for each password. So, if you want to give a user access for a defined period, you can do so. After expiry, if the user wants to change their password, they can’t do it without the admin’s permission.
- Backup: You can opt for Intuit’s online backup services, Intuit Data Protect, to automatically back up your data on secure cloud servers. However, you will need to pay additional charges for this service.
Why QuickBooks Enterprise Should Be Your Winery’s Choice
With its comprehensive features, QuickBooks Enterprise is an all-in-one solution for wineries. The features are uniquely tailored to the wine industry’s specific pain points, from stock management to compliance. By fully using them, wineries can improve their operating efficiency, gain clearer financial insights, and scale their business easily.
QuickBooks Enterprise provides the tools you need to succeed in the competitive wine market. However, if you want to boost its capabilities, add the power of cloud hosting. Hosting QuickBooks Enterprise on the cloud gives you unmatched benefits like anywhere access, on-demand IT scalability, multi-tier security, and unlimited data storage.
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