Sell more wine this season by trusting your numbers
October, November, and December are the busiest stretch of the year for a lot of wineries. Distributors reorder ahead of the holidays, restaurants stock up for holiday menus, club shipments go out, and corporate gift orders keep coming in. It’s the best chance all year to sell more wine. For many beverage alcohol businesses, OND can represent 30 to 40% of annual sales.
It’s also when spreadsheet inventory tends to fall apart. A wholesale order gets keyed in twice. The tasting room sells the last cases of a current release wine that a distributor already committed to. Someone stays late counting pallets because nobody trusts the number on the screen.
Usually the wineries that sell the most in OND are the ones that know exactly what they have, where it’s going, and what it’s earning them. Here are five ways to get your inventory under control before the holiday rush peaks.
1. Never Oversell (or Undersell) Your Best SKUs
Holiday demand usually lands on a few wines: the gift-worthy bottle, the reserve Cab, the bubbles that every restaurant wants on its December list. Those are the wines you can’t afford to get wrong. Oversell them, and you’re making awkward calls to accounts. Undersell them because you weren’t sure what was left, and you’ve lost revenue you won’t get back. Plus, use the scarcity of your last few cases as a selling tactic to move through them, confidently and without discounting.
InnoVint SUPPLY keeps one live inventory count across your whole business. Wholesale orders and DTC sales pull from the same number, so your sales team, tasting room, and ops staff are all looking at the same inventory.
Dan Salinas, Sales Admin Specialist at Schug, says that shared number has changed how his team works:
Our team can now use SUPPLY and know exactly what our inventory is at any point in time, for any product. And that alone is a huge relief. I don’t have to run down and manually count product, and we don’t oversell or undersell. I trust the numbers in it.
Dan Salinas (Sales Admin Specialist at Schug)
2. Fulfill More Wholesale Orders, Faster
When reorders spike, the bottleneck usually isn’t demand. It’s the time it takes to get each order out the door. Your team builds the order in a spreadsheet, then again in your accounting system, and once more in your fulfillment system (ahem, spreadsheet), you confirm pricing over email, write up the paperwork, and then someone has to remember to deduct inventory.
SUPPLY’s Wholesale Order Management handles all of it in one place. Create the order, manage the customer, and fulfill the shipment without leaving InnoVint. When an order ships, your bonded and tax-paid inventory depletes automatically, so there’s no manual adjustment and no second system to update.
Wineries using SUPPLY are reporting 5+ hours saved per week on order and inventory management alone. During the holidays, that’s time your team can spend selling instead of reconciling.
3. Get Invoices Out (and Get Paid) Without Double Entry
More orders means more invoices, and every invoice entered twice is another chance for a typo, a missed line item, or a late payment. In December, you don’t have the time for that kind of rework.
With SUPPLY, you create the invoice once, from the same screen where the order lives, then create an export that can be easily imported into QuickBooks. You can export one invoice at a time or in bulk, so even a heavy shipping week doesn’t turn into a heavy data entry week.
At Schug, the QuickBooks workflow cut three steps out of the invoicing process. Dan estimates SUPPLY saves him about an hour a day, depending on how much he’s shipping:
It’s saved me an hour a day, five hours a week, depending on how much I’m shipping, giving me about a day of my week back.
Dan Salinas (Sales Admin Specialist at Schug)
4. Know Which Customers and Wines Are Actually Making You Money
Holiday selling often brings promos, volume deals, gift packs, and special pricing for key accounts. Those deals can move a lot of wine, but they can also hide thin margins if you can’t see your true cost of a case.
SUPPLY’s COGS tracking shows the real cost alongside every order you fulfill. Enter your per-item costs, and SUPPLY calculates per-case and inventory-on-hand cost for you. The Wholesale Revenue & Profit by SKU report also gets granular on which SKUs are generating the most profit for you, so you can double down or backpedal where needed, before its too late.
Plus, order reporting by customer shows revenue and profit per customer, so you can see who’s buying your wine and where you’re actually making money.
That visibility helps you decide where to push in December. It also gives your CFO or controller real numbers to plan next year’s budget around.
5. Walk Into Year-End Inventory With Confidence
The holiday rush ends right as year-end close and January physical counts begin. If your records are scattered across spreadsheets and email threads, that’s when every mistake from the last three months comes back to you.
SUPPLY logs every order, edit, and fulfillment automatically, with the invoice, bill of lading, purchase order, and customer details attached to each order. When a count is off, you can see exactly where it went wrong instead of digging through old files.
Sarah Blakeley, Compliance Manager at Pedroncelli Winery, says it has made her monthly counts more reliable than ever:
Since using InnoVint, our inventory has been the most accurate it’s ever been. Every month we do a physical count and compare it to what’s in SUPPLY, and if anything’s off, there’s a super easy way to see exactly where it went wrong.
Sarah Blakeley (Compliance Manager at Pedroncelli Winery)
‘Tis the Season to Sell More Wine
The holidays reward wineries that can move fast and trust their numbers. With wholesale orders, live inventory, invoicing, and COGS in one system, SUPPLY takes the guesswork out of your busiest season so you can focus on selling and start the new year with clean books.
If you’ve looked at SUPPLY before, it’s worth a second look. Wholesale Order Management, the QuickBooks invoice workflow, and expanded COGS tracking are all live now for every winery on InnoVint SUPPLY.
