Does anyone use Vin65 to track their sales and inventory to their Distributor revenue and inventory?
First thought was to create an Inventory Pool for Wholesale which would allow me to track Wholesale transfers. But then the inventory technically still exists in the system and it does not track revenue from FOB.
I was thinking of creating a Customer ID for the Distributor and giving them set Wholesale pricing on account but I don’t want the revenue showing up on my DTC dashboard.
Any thoughts?
Vin65’s inventory management system is really rudimentary at this point. Managing multiple inventories, receiving invoices, transferring, depleting, etc etc is really clunky.
Unless we’re talking only a few cases here and there, you’d probably be better off using another system to keep track of such inventory, such as your accounting receiving/payables package (ie Quickbooks, Sage, etc)
If you’re really hell bent on keeping everything inside Vin65, I would create a order type called Wholesale and a promo for 100% off orders with order type Wholesale. Then just ring out the wine using either the POS or the admin panel. Note that this is for inventory depletion only. If you’re looking to do invoicing and billing through Vin65, I can’t help you.
On your dashboard, sales are broken out by order types, so it shouldn’t mess up your dashboard totals, and for reporting, you can just remove the wholesale order types to keep things clean. Hope this helps!
Yes, we are treating the distributor as a customer. I can easily override the retail pricing to give distributor pricing.
The inventory is sold here and picked up here anyway so this helps me with my monthly counts. I invoice them in Vin65 and tender the sale “on account”. Our staff accountant keeps track of the A/R in QB and it has not been a problem. In reports, it is easy to pull the customer out so it does not skew our retail numbers.
The main problem is that because we are ringing in the distributor sales via Vin65, it has put our pricing tier at the highest level in Vin65 platform so it is costing us a lot of money over the course of a year. Will be watching this post to see what others have to say.
I have also posted and am looking to know the best practice for this. I called cust.serv and the gentleman was lovely but did not know how to do this, and said he’d have someone contact me. They never did. So I made a ticket, which they closed with out answering my question.
If anyone is out there that actually works at Vin65 and KNOWS how to do this please post here for all of us, a step by step on the best way you see your clientele handling this subject.
Thank you!
Mel
Tagging @zach (and padding to 20 chars…)
Thanks for the posts here. Vin65 is solely focused on direct-to-consumer sales, so our support team wouldn’t be able to offer a process/recommendations to handle orders for wholesale/distributors.
So the issue I’m seeing here is that for most of us wholesale comes out of the same pool as DTC, so we have no obvious way to deal with depletion from that pool.
Since wholesale tends to be high quantity per order and low frequency for most of us, one alternative is to use the inventory importer to directly adjust. You can add notes to the import to keep track of customer, invoice, etc. Not perfect but it keeps the numbers straight.
Hopefully a refresh someday of the Inventory Transactions report will make this approach a little more palatable. (palletable? 
)
We use Vin65 for all orders. While it does pull from one inventory pool, we separate the Wholesale and DTC orders out by Order Type. All “Wholesale” orders are tagged with that “Order Type”, while all DTC orders can be tagged for your specific categories. For us they are: “Tasting Room” “Club Orders” and “Website/Ecommerce”. This allows us to use the reporting features for each Order type.
The Pricing can be specified as well, differentiating between “Retail” and all other sales. You just add pricing levels for “Distributor”, “Export” etc. and list the FOB price there. You can have as many price levels as you need, and then specify the pricing level for each “Distributor” under their contact file through the “Manage Store” section.
So here’s my story… we have 3 Tasting Rooms, Website orders which get fulfilled from a different location, and then a ton of Distribution that comes from winery.
Right now, the TR inventories are the only thing that seem to be 100 % correct every time.
My question is how do you folks handle this situation IF you do use Vin for tracking ALL inventory?
I do not need to create invoices from Vin, that is handled via our accounting dept.
I do need to track inventory at multiple locations.
Moreover, I need to properly control where DTC pulls from.
Thanks for any help!
So we currently have 2 tasting rooms, online sales and wholesale. I’ve established 3 separate inventory pools,
I created our Distributor as customer with a $0 amount pricing. When we receive a PO from them I enter it into the system as an order via the Admin panel but tell it to pull inventory from the “Tax Un-paid” pool. This allows me to run my monthly “Inventory Transfer Report” just looking at the “Tax Un-paid” pools transactions. I should only see product transfers to the other two pools for DTC and Order # just for wholesale.
This one report will show me the volume I need to pay taxes on. I also get the bottle count for wholesale that I have to break out into QB to pair with the Distributor Invoices.
Its kind of a 2 step work around but it works. If you run the distributor as a wholesale customer it pushes you up in tier pricing.
We have also tried to find the best way to work with this. We have chosen to put all inventory in the default pool, put wine needed for the next years wine club in wine club pool, and then we did put in a warehouse pool, but it just doesn’t work. So at the end of every week, we take the wholesale orders (that are not processed through Vin65), and just delete that inventory from our default inventory pool. It’s a real pain in the neck, as our inventory true up, just never adds up, we’re always missing bottles when we do inventory. It’s an issue also that we don’t know what we should have in inventory because it hasn’t shipped yet but is sold. So then we have to run a report of unshipped orders to deduct them from the inventory on hand before we adjust the actual inventory in Vin65. So we’re over, then we’re short when we’ve counted inventory that was sold but not shipped. Frustrating and seems like there just should be a better way.
