For many breweries, managing daily operations often begins with spreadsheets, tracking everything from production to raw materials and sales. Spreadsheets offer a low-cost, flexible solution, but as your brewery scales, they can become more of a burden than a benefit. Over time, spreadsheets are prone to errors, difficult to manage, and can take significant time to update.
On the other hand, brewery software provides streamlined operations, enhanced data accuracy, and real-time insights that lead to better decision-making. But when spreadsheets come with the attractive price of free, is brewery software worth the investment?
In this article, we’ll compare brewery software with spreadsheets in key areas, including:
Spreadsheets rely heavily on manual data entry, which naturally increases the risk of errors. Research shows that almost 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, which could lead to incorrect inventory tracking, inaccurate production schedules, or faulty financial reports for breweries. Over time, these errors can result in costly mistakes, from production delays to budgeting mishaps.
Brewery software, like Beer30, automates data entry, reducing the chance of human error. By providing real-time data tracking, brewery software ensures accurate batch traceability, which helps avoid costly errors in ingredient usage, brewing schedules, and regulatory compliance. This increased accuracy can directly impact your brewery’s bottom line by saving both time and resources.
Spreadsheets, while flexible, require a significant time investment. Brewers and managers may spend hours manually updating data, cross-referencing sheets, and ensuring numbers are correct. This time spent managing spreadsheets is time taken away from brewing and improving operations.
In contrast, brewery software integrates all operational aspects—inventory, production, sales, and financial data—into a single, easy-to-use platform. Instead of having multiple spreadsheets that need to be tracked down through multiple folders over multiple iterations, Beer30 keeps everything you need under one roof and acts as a single source of truth for all of your brewery’s data.
Beer30 users report saving up to 20 hours each week through automation of tasks like inventory management and production scheduling. In fact, Your Mates Brewing in Australia reduced their production management time so significantly with Beer30 that they saved approximately $100,000 (AUD) annually.
“You'd have to employ another person who was experienced in inventory management, scheduling, and materials resource planning—someone who could build a database that could give you the information that Beer30 is giving you. That’s a $100,000 salary, I’d say,” says Christian McGarry, cofounder of Your Mates.
You might be thinking, “Well we’re just a small brewery. I’m not sure if it would be worth it for us.” And you know what? You may be right. Brewery software isn’t going to be the right solution for every single brewery, BUT if you want to see if it is, we encourage you to schedule a free ROI consultation and see how much your potential savings could be.
Spreadsheets provide a static snapshot of data, meaning they need to be constantly updated to reflect current operations. This is good for seeing historical data, but makes it difficult to make real-time, data-driven decisions. If you're relying on yesterday’s numbers, you may miss important information which could lead to bigger, more expensive issues.
For example, let’s say you experience a temperature change during fermentation because something kicked out your temperature control. This could cause some serious off flavors and if you’re using spreadsheets, you won’t know what happened until it’s too late and the batch is ruined.
In contrast, Beer30 provides real-time data visibility from any smart device, allowing breweries to make immediate adjustments. So if something is threatening the quality of your beer, you’ll know immediately and can take action to save that batch. Real time data helps reduce waste and can directly improve profitability.
Detecting inefficiencies at your brewery could be the difference between keeping your doors open or not. With spreadsheets, most breweries have their data locked up in tables and rows and it’s hard to get a good visual image of what’s really going on. Between sales data trends, fermentation data, and inventory data, spreadsheets offer very limited capabilities when it comes to identifying inefficiencies. Detecting trends or areas where the brewing process can be optimized is labor-intensive and often overlooked because spreadsheets don’t inherently provide visual insights beyond the raw data. It can be hard to identify performance trends and see where production inefficiencies are coming from.
This was exactly the case for Pelican Brewing in Pacific City, Oregon.
Before Beer30, the Pelican team knew they faced challenges with production efficiencies and had difficulties tracking performance trends with different beers. Yet perhaps the biggest issues they faced were those they didn’t even know existed due to poor visibility.
With Beer30 brewery software, the team was able to bring all of Pelican’s production logs into a single, accurate source. Batch History reporting pulled the entire production process into a comprehensive report for each batch of beer. That gave Pelican’s production team the ability to understand how upstream changes truly impacted the yield and quality of each finished batch—a process that would normally live in anywhere from seven to 15 spreadsheets for breweries using different ERP systems without Beer30 software.
Beer30, helps breweries identify inefficiencies by offering detailed reporting and analysis features that highlight production, packaging, and inventory management. These insights enable breweries to fine-tune their processes, reduce waste, and ultimately save money.
For Pelican Brewing, this meant they were able to:
Overall, Pelican was able to grow sales by $550,000 through added beer production over the span of one year after implementing brewing software.
Consistency is essential in brewing to maintain quality and brand reputation. However, tracking consistency through spreadsheets is challenging because they lack full traceability of ingredients and production variables.
Brewery software like Beer30 offers complete batch traceability, ensuring consistency in factors like temperature, yeast health, pH levels, and fermentation times. Should an inconsistency arise, the software helps identify and correct it quickly, preventing future issues and preserving product quality.
Complying with Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) regulations can be a nightmare when using spreadsheets. Manually gathering data for production, sales, and tax reporting is time-consuming and increases the risk of error, which can lead to fines or other compliance issues.
Brewery software automates the TTB reporting process. With Beer30, all necessary data is tracked and ready for submission, saving breweries countless hours and ensuring compliance with regulations. By automating this process, breweries reduce the risk of non-compliance and can focus on growing their business and brewing better beer.
So is brewery management software worth it? The answer is…yes, probably.
Ultimately it will depend on your brewery but brewery software like Beer30 has helped hundreds of breweries optimize their production and boost their ROI.
Although spreadsheets may seem like an appealing, low-cost solution, they quickly become cumbersome and error-prone as your brewery grows. Brewery software like Beer30 provides an all-in-one solution that improves data accuracy, reduces labor costs, and offers real-time insights.
While we understand that spreadsheets are free to use and readily available, it might be worth it to look into brewing software like Beer30.
After all, there’s nothing to lose from setting up a quick introductory demo and consultation, but not using brewery software could be costing your brewery thousands in production and labor costs.
For more information on how breweries are saving thousands by using Beer30, please check out some case studies from real Beer30 customers.
