I am looking to find someone who has a good solution for gathering information to post into your general ledger package, ie, Quickbooks, AMS, or what ever you are using to report sales, inventory changes, cogs to your owners.
I am new to VIN65 and quite frustrated that I cannot find a report that shows me by State that I don’t have to manipulate by adding columns, rows to total etc.
Gross Sales
Discounts
Net Sales
Shipping
Taxes
Total
Total COGS
Inventory totaled by sku
I also need to have Open sales details in order to post a liability to the balance sheet if there are orders that are unshipped.
From my limited experience with Vin65 - their reporting, as it stands today, is more of an excel dump of information than reports made for a specific purpose.
As such, we use the webservices to grab information from Vin65 in order to post to our general ledger and do not rely on the reports.
For open sales details - we changed our Vin65 settings such that orders are only marked as ‘completed’ when both sides of the transaction are done. Money is collected and inventory is picked up/shipped. Then we post our completed orders for the month and accountants can look at the orders remaining in ‘submitted’ status as open orders to be handled however they need to be handled.
Webservices are applications that are available online and will respond to requests with certain data. Typically they are used for one program to talk to another program. We have a program that says ‘hey Vin65 what sales orders do you have?’ using their webservices, and the response back is a list of orders.
It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s generally how it works. It’s a chore to get setup, but once its working you’re good to go. I’d recommend checking out the documentation and chatting with the Vin65 people.
I would be interested in learning more about the WebServices queries and help setting up as we have a need to have significantly more powerful reporting than the existing canned reports in VIN65.
Also, just wondering why these types of queries aren’t just part of the existing functionality of the VIN65 reporting function? Wouldn’t a lot of these types of queries through the WebServices function be necessary for all of your customers and therefore, value-added functionality to have in the product itself?
Hi @lcoston, we happily provide an open API for clients to build their own integrations with Vin65, however, we don’t provide any queries/scripts.
To communicate with Vin65’s webservices, you’ll need to have a developer write a customized solution for you.
In a nutshell, webservices are a means to get your data how you want. To draw an analogy, webservices are a box of Legos. We provide the instruction manual but it’s up to you to build them how you want them.
As for Reporting, here and now at Vin65 we’re working on two things: improving the POS platform and improving Reports. We understand how important reporting is and we’re doing everything we can to make it better.
We’ve done some custom webservices integrations. The APIs mostly allow a service to pull out things like customer data or sales data on regular intervals. So if you were trying to have something pull into your accounting software, your programmer would need to build a mapped conduit between the two, or possibly through an intermediary database.
Some of our programmers have had some issues since Vin65 uses these old SOAP APIs which aren’t very flexible or easy to work with. So you’ll need to keep that in mind.
@EdFarmCollective Thanks for the info. I think our issue is more from the standpoint that a lot of our sales aren’t instant POS transactions and so there may be a significant difference in the timing of when the order is placed and when it is actually shipped. We use Ship Compliant’s integration back to VIN65 to be able to capture shipments within 30 days, but if something isn’t shipped within 30 days, we have to manually input the shipping date into VIN65. We are spending all of this time trying to capture that information in VIN65 so that we can have a one stop place to find all customer-related data regarding their transactions but yet we cannot pull a report that will provide accrual basis sales, only cash basis. At a minimum, it would be nice to have a report that at least provided sales for the month with date shipped so that we can at least back into the amount that we need to defer for the month.
I feel like I am alone in this fight. Do most wineries just not worry about it and record on a cash basis until the end of the year or something? Since we sell pre-release wine, I am not sure we can use the argument of deeming our deferred revenue immaterial from month to month.
I am also new to the wine industry and the tools available out there.
Can you recommend any best practice forums for wineries?
