Tools

Winery Management Toolkit

With sev­er­al hun­dred winer­ies on the Cen­tral Coast, Glenn Bur­dette is fre­quent­ly asked for busi­ness tools and tem­plates to assist win­ery own­ers, man­agers, accoun­tants and book­keep­ers as they nav­i­gate the com­plex­i­ties asso­ci­at­ed with win­ery account­ing and finance.

Toolkit Overview

With sev­er­al hun­dred winer­ies on the Cen­tral Coast, Glenn Bur­dette is fre­quent­ly asked for busi­ness tools and tem­plates to assist win­ery own­ers, man­agers, accoun­tants and book­keep­ers as they nav­i­gate the com­plex­i­ties asso­ci­at­ed with win­ery account­ing and finance. As part of the Cen­tral Coast Wine Region, Glenn Burdette’s Win­ery Man­age­ment Toolk­it offers resources to help small busi­ness own­ers. These tools are ​“open source,” mean­ing they can be mod­i­fied by you to fit your par­tic­u­lar needs. With these tools you can gain deep­er insight and feed­back from your busi­ness at its var­i­ous stages. Please con­tact our Wine Team (805.544.1441) if you would like to dis­cuss any of these tools and how they could be uti­lized in your business.

This tem­plate can assist you with cal­cu­lat­ing the cost to pro­duce wine. It is designed using the ​“peri­od” con­cept of account­ing and assumes that this spread­sheet will roll from peri­od to peri­od. It is not designed to cap­ture or cal­cu­late a sin­gle vin­tage from begin­ning to end. This is because vin­tages often span mul­ti­ple account­ing periods.

This tem­plate can help you com­pute your expect­ed rev­enue after account­ing for your var­i­ous prof­it chan­nels and their asso­ci­at­ed dis­counts, allowances, spe­cial pric­ing arrange­ments, and incentives.

  • This sam­ple chart of accounts can be pro­vid­ed in Excel in the event that you wish to import it into your account­ing sys­tem. This chart of account assumes that you have a ​“flat” gen­er­al ledger sys­tem that does not have vol­ume track­ing that fol­lows the cost accounting.
  • This sam­ple Quick­Books 2014 file is a start­ing point for new small-sized winer­ies. This Quick­Books file is pop­u­lat­ed only with the Chart of Accounts. Your com­pa­ny infor­ma­tion will need to be updat­ed under Com­pa­ny > My Company.
  • This PDF of the sam­ple chart of accounts shows how gen­er­al ledger accounts can be grouped for cost pool­ing. This group­ing allows for sum­ma­ry lev­el and detailed report­ing of cost pools and their relat­ed cost accounts.

About Chart of Account Numbering:

Account­ing best prac­tices use a stan­dard­ized num­ber­ing sys­tem for the chart of accounts. This assists with data input, map­ping of gen­er­al ledgers to finan­cial state­ments and tax return prepa­ra­tion and assists with trac­ing, tick­ing and tying sched­ules to spe­cif­ic accounts. We rec­om­mend that each account be assigned a num­ber. By using six dig­its you can break down your chart of accounts into cost pools and expense categories.

General Structure:

10000 · Assets
20000 · Liabilities
30000 · Equity
40000 · Revenue
50000 · Cost of Goods Sold
60000 · Pro­duc­tion Costs (allo­cate to inventory)
70000 · Sales & Mar­ket­ing Expenses
80000 · Gen­er­al & Administrative
90000 · Oth­er Income & Expenses

This tem­plate can help you set sales goals with your sales man­agers and track expect­ed sales against actu­al sales. Designed to be sim­ple, this tem­plate fore­casts based on sea­son­al­i­ty, which you can deter­mine from your own sales his­to­ry or bench­mark against indus­try aver­ages. Each chan­nel rolls up into an exec­u­tive summary.

These tem­plates can give you a tool to assist you with struc­tur­ing a for­mu­la-based incen­tive com­pen­sa­tion plan that align with three strate­gic pri­or­i­ties. The incen­tive com­pen­sa­tion mod­el allows for set­ting a range of suc­cess fac­tors that are inde­pen­dent­ly com­put­ed and weight­ed against a total incen­tive com­pen­sa­tion amount.

This tem­plate can help you com­pute your finan­cial per­for­mance met­rics and com­pare change in per­for­mance over var­i­ous peri­ods in time. These met­rics also pro­vide stan­dard bench­marks for ratios that apply to var­i­ous size wineries.

Before mak­ing the deci­sion to move for­ward on a Cap­i­tal Improve­ment Project, be sure you have a clear under­stand­ing of the full impact it will have on your after-tax cash flow. This tem­plate is a case study of an analy­sis of the cash cost and cash ben­e­fit of mov­ing case stor­age from a third par­ty off-site facil­i­ty to an on-site con­struct­ed case goods facil­i­ty, with the assump­tion that the facil­i­ty will only be used for case goods stor­age and not wine processing.