Brewery Consulting and Accounting for Craft

Be sure to visit your state’s department of revenue and ABC commission websites or call those entities for more information. Larger breweries may enter into really long purchasing contracts for their ingredients – like, ten year contracts for hops – so that has to be disclosed as a long term commitment. Next up, the wort is boiled, while hops and other spices are added. Hops add bitterness to balance out the sugar in the wort.

TTB & Tax Reporting

• In fact, we are privileged to work with them every single day.
• Auburn, NY was listed as having 6 breweries, which is quite a few.
• Small Brewery Finance offers a framework for interpreting financial reports, building budgets and creating pro-forma financial statements for launching a brewery, purchasing additional equipment or scouting a new location.
• It is important to understand that COGS at this level is a dynamic.
• Our team of brewery consultants, accountants, tax specialists and industry experts are here to help breweries like yours grow, profit, and thrive.
• Then finished goods might be broken down into pack types, such as packaged and kegged.

Start with a rolling 90-day forecast to ensure you have sufficient operating capital to get through your production, inventory, and AR cycles and extend the forecast horizon as needed to plan for seasonality or downturn. A trusted advisor in the craft beer space, Maria will give an overview of the business life cycle and share industry-specific advice on what brewers need to know at various stages of that cycle. Maria will explain how financial and accounting needs evolve as a brewery reaches new milestones. Whether you self-distribute, work with a distributor, or just sell in your taproom, it’s important that the sales team completes budget worksheets first. This is because other teams, like marketing, frequently base their plans and budgets on projected revenue.

Our Numbers Powered Growth Service

• The craft beverage team currently exceeds 20 professionals and continues to grow across the country.
• The state rates are wildly different, with some states like Wyoming charging next to nothing, and Alaska charging super-high rates.
• More than a few breweries, distilleries, and craft beverage producers have decided to act and Turn Pro.
• Regulations can be tricky, and you certainly don’t want to get caught up in the law for a simple misunderstanding.
• I assume you’re generally familiar with how beer is made, so here’s just a short overview.

We can assist with ensuring your payroll is set up correctly and help integrate your payroll transactions with your accounting system. And then we have excise taxes, which are charged straight Brewery Accounting to the brewery, not to customers. The brewery has to pay the federal government an excise tax on each barrel of production, and usually another excise tax to the state government.

Merchandise Accounting

The craft beverage team is one of many industry specialty teams that work within Baker Tilly. The craft beverage team currently exceeds 20 professionals and continues to grow across the country. For those who need some brewery accounting assistance, Ekos’s Hunter Snellings partnered up with Maria Pearman, CPA for a webinar. Maria and Hunter shared many actionable takeaways for setting your business up for growth and long-term success. For all of the details, you can watch their webinar here.

EBITDA vs. Cash Flow

• ABC examines the activities in the brewing process to establish rates.
• We recommend engaging a CPA or tax accountant if you need help with the nitty gritty, but here are some of the essentials.
• Brooklyn, NY was listed as having 106 breweries, which is quite a few.
• This way, you’ll have had ample time to plan out everything you need to start out the new year with a bang.
• She’s a consultant who brings experience with inventory planning and sales trends who will be based in the firm’s Minneapolis office.
• One thing to note about excise tax is that if you are contract brewing in-house for another brewery, that alcohol needs to be taxed from your space as well.

For breweries under 50,000 bbls in production, our process has brought clarity to profit and growth. Course DescriptionThe operations of a brewery present several unique issues for the accountant, especially in regard to beer costs and taproom operations. During times of cost and capacity pressure, it’s imperative for brewery leadership to know product margins inside-out, backward, https://www.bookstime.com/ and upside down. Margin by SKU, distributor, segment, with overhead, without overhead, etc. should all be tracked and reviewed regularly with leadership teams to ensure your product portfolio and pricing are optimized for cash returns. Since supply chain volatility is increasing raw material pricing, it’s imperative to stay on top of product margin changes over time.

This latest craft plateau has separated the wheat from the chaff.

Second, stale or unused beer may be returned by distributors, in which case it’s also charged to expense through the cost of goods sold. A larger brewery might even accrue for expected amounts of stale beer, which brings up one of the best account names ever, and I am not making this up – accrued stale beer. And finally, we get to bottling and aging, where the beer goes into cans, bottles, or kegs, sometimes with artificial carbonation. If there’s no artificial carbonation, then it may be aged for a while, to give it time to naturally carbonate. At this point, the beer production process is complete, but there’s also a lot of waste, which is called spent grain.

About Brewery Accounting Services

The focus here will be on reviewing last year’s numbers, tracking whether you met the annual goals your team set for the business last year, and discussing how to progress toward long-term goals in the coming year. I want to apologize if I have crushed your dreams of running a full ABC analysis on your brewery. I have experienced, first hand, what happens when you try to run an ABC analysis on a brewery with weak processes and limited data. You would need the right person leading the charge and enough money to pay for it. In my next post, I will share with you what we have used to replace an ABC analysis.

Brewery Consulting, Accounting, and Financial Strategy

A brewery usually owns its own kegs, so compressing the cycle time for its kegs means that it has to invest in fewer kegs, which improves its cash flow. I won’t get into the usual materials and labor and overhead topics, but here are a couple of issues that are unique to breweries. If so, it’s charged to expense right away, through the cost of goods sold.