Craft Beverages
Grain in the silo, beer in the tank, kegs on the truck. We track inventory at every stage so you know what a batch actually costs.
Inventory in Three Places at Once
You’ve got grain in storage, a batch fermenting, another one conditioning, kegs ready to sell, and cans sitting in the cooler. All of it is inventory. All of it is money you’ve spent waiting to become money again. But it’s not all worth the same thing, and it’s not all at the same stage.
Most accounting treats inventory as one number. Buy it, sell it, done. Craft production doesn’t work that way. Raw materials become work in progress become finished goods, sometimes over weeks or months. If you’re not tracking each stage, you don’t actually know what you have or what it’s worth.
Who This Is For
Who This Is For
Breweries, wineries, cideries, distilleries, meaderies. Anyone producing beverages where inventory sits in different stages before it’s ready to sell.
The Problem
The Problem
You know what’s in the tanks. You know what’s on the shelf. But what’s the dollar value of each? That answer matters for taxes, for lending, for knowing where your cash is tied up.
What Does a Batch Actually Cost?
You brewed 15 barrels of IPA. Grain, hops, yeast, water treatment, labor, utilities, tank time. What did that batch cost to produce? Most craft producers have a rough idea. Few have the real number. And without the real number, you can’t know if you’re making money when you sell it.
A keg you think costs $80 to produce might actually cost $110 when you add everything up. Sell it to a distributor for $130 and you’re making $20, not $50. That math changes which accounts are worth keeping and which ones are just moving liquid for someone else’s profit.
Batch Costing
Batch Costing
Ingredients, labor, overhead allocated to each batch. When it’s done fermenting, you know exactly what it cost to make.
Cost Per Unit
Cost Per Unit
What does a keg cost? A case? A pint poured in the taproom? Real numbers for real pricing decisions.
Raw Materials Add Up Fast
A pallet of grain arrives. A shipment of hops. Bottles, caps, labels, boxes. You’re buying inputs constantly, sometimes months before they turn into something you can sell. That cash is gone but the revenue hasn’t arrived yet. The gap is where cash flow gets tight.
And prices move. Barley costs more than last year. That hop variety you love went up 20%. Glass prices spiked. If you’re not tracking input costs over time, you won’t notice your margins shrinking until they’re already gone.
Input Tracking
Input Tracking
What you’re buying, what you’re paying, how it compares to last quarter. See cost changes before they eat your margin.
Inventory Value
Inventory Value
Raw materials, work in progress, finished goods. Each category tracked so you know where your money is sitting at any given time.
Numbers That Help You Price
The taproom pours at one margin. Distribution sells at another. A collab batch with another brewery might be a wash. A barrel-aged release you spent 18 months on better be priced to reflect what it actually cost to make. None of these decisions work without real production costs.
We give you batch-level costing and margin by sales channel. When you’re deciding whether to take on a new distributor, launch a new SKU, or discontinue something that isn’t selling, you’ll have the numbers to back up the decision instead of a hunch.
Margin by Channel
Margin by Channel
Taproom, distribution, retail, online. What you’re actually making on each, so you know where to focus.
Product Decisions
Product Decisions
Which beers make money? Which ones break even? Which ones should be retired? Data to answer the question instead of guessing.
Greater Richmond's Small Business Bookkeeper
The Next Step:
A Short Conversation
Fifteen minutes to tell us what you're dealing with. We'll let you know how we can help and give you a clear price quote.
