Sarah Buckholtz is a Content Writer and Editor for Ollie, Untappd, Oznr, and Hop Culture. For more than a decade she has interviewed everyone from artisan makers to Grammy-nominated musicians to Jefferson Award-winning preservationists. She is a former blog writer and marketing manager for American Pickers creator and host, Mike Wolfe, covering stories about heritage tourism and preservation coast-to-coast. Sarah grew up on the shores of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania and is currently drinking a Jackalope Thunder Ann in Nashville, Tennessee.
As a brewer, when it comes to your day-to-day operations, reliability is key.
Just as you pride yourself on using the best ingredients for your beer, why shouldn’t the same care go into a reliable brewery management system that works with your brewery as it grows?
In the past, breweries have often used Google Sheets as a way to organize their inventory. But this can actually be a timely and inefficient process.
A brewery management tool built by brewers, for brewers, on the other hand, can intuitively manage your brewery’s day-to-day operations. So you can get back to doing what you do best: brewing beer.
Here are the three best reasons to close out that messy, inaccurate Google Sheets tab and invest in a brewery management tool.
Forget Manual Data Entry, Maintain Your Data in Real Time
No matter how skilled you are with Google Sheets, there is still a lot of manual data entry and maintenance required.
“I was spending hours every week keeping my sheets up to date, and that’s not even taking into account the time it took to build them in the first place,” says Kyle Kensrue who used to run a 2,500bbl brewery. “It’s next to impossible to keep things up to date in real time. And I’d find that no matter how hard I tried, they were still inaccurate.”
A brewery management tool, on the other hand, maintains your real-time inventory automatically, saving you hours spent updating spreadsheets.
For example, if you’re brewing a stout, software such as Ollie takes into account all the raw material you’re pulling out for that recipe, lists them on a bill, and removes them from your inventory.
Since Ollie keeps track of this information, you can spend less time updating spreadsheets from your drafty office and more time brewing or supervising on the production floor.
It’s that simple.
An Intuitive Process That Grows With Your Brewery
When your brewery experiences rapid growth, it helps having a management system in place that will grow with you. A program that can handle your expansion means that you can spend more time focusing on beer quality. And less on worrying about the inconsistency of an out-of-date Google Sheets, for example.
“You want a system that will be able to grow with you as you increase production or your sales footprint,” says Ollie Brewery Solutions Consultant Dustin Jeffers. “The last thing you want to do while doubling production is to transition to a new ERP system or off of spreadsheets onto a system. At that point in your brewery’s life, you want to make sure you are able to put the best product out there and make a great first impression on your new customers.”
That’s why, if you want to grow as a business, it’s important to consider ditching Google Sheets for a perceptive brewery management system that tracks your production, inventory, and sales.
Build Reports for More Accurate Forecasting
As a brewer or brewery owner, you should have one goal in mind: to brew your best beer as efficiently as possible.
With Google Sheets, you constantly have to upkeep and create manual entries. Meaning, when it comes time to develop detailed and thorough reports, Google Sheets just doesn’t have the intelligence to build out the data you need.
A brewery management system can create real-time reports of what’s happening at your brewery, from recording batch inventory to creating purchase orders.
Can you do that with Google Sheets?
Having your production management set up in one convenient operation allows you and your team to schedule recipes in advance, see what materials you’re using the most, and accurately plan out batches of beer.
Forecasting for the future will help you stay within your budget and maximize your bottom line.
Any way you look at it, Google Sheets is an outdated way to run your business. Leverage brewery management software to streamline your operations from grain to glass.
Looking for more? Here are three more reasons to exit out of Google Sheets!
