Beverage Inventory for Clubs

Virtually every Club that sells and serves wine, beer, and spirits, manages the asset as an inventory account. The decision to purchase products “directly”, where the cost of the products are recorded when purchased, or through “inventory” when the cost of the products are recorded when sold or moved to a direct ledger account, resides with the CFO. The CFO is directly responsible for asset management, and inventory is an asset. However, the responsibility of taking inventory and managing inventory, including purchasing and receiving, falls into the operations team.

Beverage Inventory is comprised of beer, spirits, and wine, that are purchased by a club for the purpose of being sold to their members and guests. The cost of the beer, wine, and spirits that have been purchased but not sold is reported in the “Inventory” account. It is reported as a current asset on the company's balance sheet. Inventory can be a significant asset, and as such, it has to be carefully managed. Excessive inventory may result in cash flow drain and too little inventory may result in lost sales and member dissatisfaction.

Managing beverage inventory involves controlling the supply chain, product pricing, security, ordering, receiving, and taking inventory. These components best serve the Club when they are interlinked to one another by a single technology solution because they are all, in fact, connected.

Taking beverage inventory is frequently time-consuming and tedious, and as a result, has frequent errors in counts and costs. Ordering beverages for an inventory account is also time-consuming for clubs and is accomplished through phone orders, email orders, sales-person orders, and web orders. Often products ordered and received are not reconciled in club operations.

Automation of the inventory process for all of the components is essential to reduce time, costs, and errors. CedarCreek System has the best comprehensive, all-inclusive inventory solution for the club industry. It combines BirchStreet’s world-class procure to pay solution with the Accubar scanning system and offers Fintech payment and BI as an inventory integration, plus POS integrations to the leading Club Management Systems, including Jonas.