Bottle count never matches WineDirect Inventory Summary

The subject basically says it all. No matter what I do, our bottle count at the tasting room never matches what we are supposed to have in WineDirect. I don’t believe theft is occurring so I am puzzled by the numbers always being wrong (not talking just a few bottles, this is multiple cases). Some background…

  • Our tasting room & winery are at different locations and have separate inventory pools. Every time stock is brought to the tasting room we do an inventory transfer.

  • Wholesale customers (restaurants, distributors) frequently pick up wine from the tasting room and are invoiced from our bookkeeper so we keep a log of that wine and I do inventory adjustments weekly to account for these.

  • Wine club shipments that are paid for get packed at processing time and are set aside.

If anyone has insight or new ideas on how they handle wholesale, inventory, etc please let me know! How often do you all do bottle counts? We used to NEVER do them, but now that we have Vin6…WineDirect… I’ve started doing them weekly and am thinking that is not often enough! Halp!

We do them start and end of day, every day. There are 101 ways for things to off on a daily basis. Best to catch them right away. Counting doesn’t take that long to do.

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Ours was right on until August of this year, and now there are major discrepancies. We do not suspect theft either, but there it is…

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Do you have web orders? Our web orders all take inventory from shipping inventory location, but if a customer selects pickup at tasting room, that throws inventory out and needs another adjustment.

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I had thought about doing this but we have SO MUCH stock at the tasting room that it seemed like too big of a project for twice a day. BUT, I think this is the way to go. I have decided to reduce stock at the tasting room, because its quite excessive, to make it easier and hope for the best. Thanks for the tip!

We do have web orders, but rarely get pick ups that way. I do suspect pick up orders are to blame on items with excess inventory but for ones that are missing cases it doesn’t apply.

It kind of sounds like you have someone not properly logging your wholesale pickups…

Regarding counting wine every day - it helps to be systematic about how you maintain stock. We have about 12 wine SKUs live at any point in time, and we keep 3-6 cases of each on hand. In the store each SKU gets maintained in the same location so that it’s easier to find them. Feel free to stop by and see if you want :wink:

I think this is the case, too. I’ve been trying everything to control all the factors that contribute to manual inventory adjustments but nothing is working. I’m working on a way to simplify the wholesale process in the tasting room to fix this. New Year new inventory process! I will likely swing by the tasting room to see what you guys do. Thanks for all the help, as usual!

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Agree, many reasons for inventory to be off. We see all the ones mentioned. Here are two more:

  1. Not capturing all samples, pours, donations and spoils.
  2. Wrong inventory location when a new product is added to a club order. Even though the order was set to come from the Tasting Room pool, any SKU’s added to the order revert to the default pool. I know; it makes no sense but that’s how the system handles it.
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I agree with Vicky ^ check to make sure things are pulling from the correct inventory pool.

Another thing to look into are pending orders. I know we have this problem from time to time due to internet connection being interrupted fairly often. If an order goes into pending it will not pull from inventory unless completed.

I just took over our inventory this year and its been a headache. We move quite a bit of wine daily and my counts consist of about 30 different wines at a time and we probably stock about 3-8 cases of each. So I have to keep track of a lot. I count about 5 days a week (just not my two off days). I do encounter a fair amount of discrepancies but overall have really reduced that number significantly.

I can’t think of anything else the previous replies haven’t already mentioned. If I do i’ll let you know. Good luck!!

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Thank you! I will have to check into the pending orders… there’s probably a report I can run to find those. We make over 20 wines and keep anywhere from 3-12 cases of each in the back of our tasting room (depending on popularity) plus two shelving units in the front with at least two cases of each wine. So. much. inventory. Starting with daily inventory in January so we can try to narrow and plug the leaks :):grinning:

So I have pulled this report two different ways so far. I am sure there are more ways as well. so if you go under sales and do the sales detail you can pull it. There are a million ways to customize this report so it can be a little daunting, but a lot of good info. the second way I actually just found. However, thinking about it now I am not sure if its as thorough. Its to go under the marketing tab of reports and there is a report for abandoned carts. These also show as pending. With either report, once downloaded you can highlight the entire spreadsheet and set it to filter. At that point you can filter out everything except pending status. Glad to help! If you find anything that works well for you i’d be interested to know. I am still working on my process and developing an SOP for finding inventory discrepancies. Thanks!!!

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I’m coming into this topic late, however my suspicion is the difference is the way that Vin65 depletes inventory, which is when the order is placed (completed) and not when it is shipped. This means that if you have orders which have not shipped your physical inventory will be greater than what Vin65 reports (because it has already depleted inventory based on those orders).

I’m new to Vin65 and even more so to inventory within Vin65 - this one caught me off guard as raced to get all my inventory loaded before shipping my orders, only to find it was “too late” to impact the inventory.

BTW - according to this link: https://documentation.vin65.com/Store/Inventory#inventory-depletion

pending orders shouldn’t be a problem because the inventory isn’t “committed” until the checkout process is complete

Good luck

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thanks Rebecca! I think with the pending orders, the inventory issue is that wine is given to the customer but the order never completed in Vin65. So it will show we are missing bottles that were intended to be purchased but due to a loss of internet connection the order didn’t go through. Fortunately it doesn’t like like we’ve had that problem! Whew! What a nightmare that would be.
We have a system for organizing and setting aside all paid for orders, but I do suspect that some pick up orders are falling through the cracks. We are going to start daily inventory January 1st so we can find the leaks and I will share here when I figure it out. Good luck with Vin65/WineDirect. This forum has helped me A LOT as a supplement to the documentation. Before we had it here I had zero experience with Vin65 and set everything up myself based solely on reading the documentation, watching videos and harassing support :slight_smile: The Facebook Vin65 group helped too, which is essentially what this forum was born from.

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hello again! When you do both counts, do you reconcile the numbers at that time too?

The expectation is that the count in the AM should be the same as yesterday’s PM. If it doesn’t, report it to management.

The PM count should reconcile based on the day’s sales and any other gozintas and gozoutas. If it doesn’t the discrepancy should point at the solution most of the time. If you still can’t resolve it, report it.

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ah! Sometimes the explanation is the simplest. I was really overthinking this. Thanks again!

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UPDATE AND NEW FRUSTRATION… get the rubber room ready
So we have been doing twice daily bottle counts since January 1st, and only are counting fri, sat and sun AM. We reconcile the previous days numbers with WD in the am and reconcile the weekend numbers with WD after the weekend. Our bottle counts are always correct. For some reason, our tasting room inventory pool amounts in WD are completely different than our bottle counts for a lot of our wines (not all). Can’t wrap my head around how this is possible. For background, we made sure WD had the correct bottle count when we started. Ideas anyone???