‘Supermarket wine’ seems to have come a long way from low cost, low quality ‘goon’ brands, or in classier terms: cardboardeaux.  Low-cost, high-quality wines have been growing in popularity all across the world and lately, winning prestigious awards normally reserved for the big ticket wines.

Lindauer, a popular New Zealand sparkling wine, recently took home the gold for their Rose at the Air New Zealand Wine Awards.  Lindauer has become a well-respected brand amongst Kiwis.  Averaging in at $8.99 NZD per bottle, it’s good to see a brand dedicated to quality regardless of price.  The love for ‘supermarket wines’ didn’t stop there.  Other Air New Zealand award winners included: Mud House, Wither Hills, Yealands Estate and St Clair Vicar’s Choice.

In the United Kingdom, Toro Loco Tempranillo, a Spanish wine sold at Aldi supermarkets was awarded  a silver medal at the International Wine and Spirit Competition this past May.  Pretty impressive for a wine that rings up at about  £3.59.  Toro Loco Tempranillo has beat other esteemed brands priced around £30.00.

Across the pond in the States, California wine Charles Shaw, more commonly known as “Two-Buck-Chuck” for its $1.99 USD price tag, caused an uproar when its Chardonnay reaped the Double Gold award at the 2007 California State Fair.  Charles Shaw is owned by boxed wine mogul Fred Franzia.  Two-Buck-Chuck triumphed against 350 other California Chardonnays in the competition.

Now, we’re not saying pricier, classic brands will be rendered irrelevant, everyone loves a nice glass of Cloudy Bay.  However, in today’s economy it’s assuring to know that when you’re pinching your penny, you won’t need to pinch your nose, too.

References:

http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/9-supermarket-wine-wins-gold-wb-132375

http://www.yumsugar.com/Wine-World-Reels-2-Buck-Chuck-Wins-Award-404101

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2149036/It-s-corker-Red-wine-costing-3-59-sold-Aldi-scoops-international-award.html

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If your current method of calculating overheads looks like this then you need our new winery overhead allocator. Remember the only thing that should be vintage in a winery is the wine!

If you are involved with running the accounting side of a winery then you will know how tedious it can be to get an accurate cost of sales and also an accurate inventory valuations for end of month or end of year reporting.

Good accounting practice means that you try to align your expenses with the timing of the revenue that they relate to. In fact many countries enshrine this in their accounting laws such as the IRD in New Zealand and UNICAP requirements in the US that even require the capitalization of indirect costs such as : certain labor costs, employee benefits, storage costs, cost recovery (depreciation),  rent,  insurance, utilities, repairs and maintenance and the list goes on.

In a recent round of surveys that we did with winery accountants, the valuation of bulk and finished wine inventories was rated the most important and the most difficult task faced by wine businesses.

This was because, while it was fairly straight forward to allocate direct costs, the same could not be said of indirect costs or overheads.  Many companies had no specials tools for this, and did these calculations only once a year at tax time, often after the wine had been sold. While is fairly easy to know what wine was produced, much of this work revolved around determining how to share out the costs accrued during the previous year. In the worst cases this was a flat average cost per bottle produced where they took total costs for the year and divided that by total annual production for the year. This gives a very blunt measure of the value of inventory which leads to inaccurate cost of sales for your differing products which means your gross profit margins on product lines are distorted and could lead to poor planning decisions and the financial implications of those.

Well we decided to give a little love back to accounting since it is helping keep us all in business. The winemakers seem to have a good handle on what wines they are producing and allocating direct costs, and the accounting team seem to have a good handle on the indirect costs of the business. What we needed to do was give the accountants a similar set of tools that the winemakers have but to be able to allocate overheads and other indirect costs to wines while in production and make this easy to do on a continuous basis.

New Feature: Overhead Allocator

And with that: Vinsight now has a new feature the Component Allocator that allows you to allocate overheads. A simple tool that allows you to take your costs like wages, rent, R&M and utilities and with the click of a button allocate these costs to wines in the winery based on criteria of your choice.

Allocate overheads to bulk wine at the click of a button

You can setup simple rule sets like “red wine in barrels” or “white wines in tank” and set their share of the costs to receive.

So you get:

a process that is easy enough to do every month so you increase the fidelity of your allocations eg White wines that take 6 months to produce get 6 shares, while red wines that are aged and stored for 12 or more months get more.

a process that uses real time data (what wine is in the winery at month end)  that is accurate and maintained by the winemaking team

a process that is documented in a system that is reusable by anyone you choose to share this with.

The post Capitalizing on Costings appeared first on Vinsight.

What have we been doing?
We have been calling prospective customers and asking them variations of a simple question: what is giving you grief when you are trying to run your part of your wine business?  Essentially people are out there every day, week, month running up against parts of their job that are difficult, unproductive, or simply lacking the necessary tools to get things done.  Those jobs get neglected, done poorly, or consume too much resource.

Why have we been doing it?
Over the years in previous iterations of our business we have built some great features that have only benefited one or two people, and even the more popular features have been hard to quantify. Firstly, in this world of limited resources we need to make sure we are allocating them wisely, and this is even more so when that resource is time.
So first up, I for one have vowed to never build another feature that (enough) people don’t want or need. Secondly, we want to be successful and this means our product has to help our customers to be more successful. So, the more impediments to making and selling great wine that we can remove, then the better for everyone.

What have we found?
One of the first findings was the difficultly of sharing data. Most people within a company rely on data from other people both inside and outside the company. People we spoke to would often receive an email or a report or if they were lucky an electronic copy of data they needed to do their part of the job. Then in turn provide similar data onto the next person in the chain.

The worst bits about this were:

a) The data often had to be re-entered in the next step manually (copy and paste if you were lucky),

b) Often times within a company, input data for one job resided in a system that the person doing the job did not have access to : eg wines that would be ready for sales in the coming months reside in the wine production system that the sales manager did not have access to. This leads to the wine department being the reporting clerks for the other areas of the business.

What have we been doing about it?

We have a bunch of ideas about lowering the barriers of data flow inside and outside Vinsight and between roles. Somethings that we have already done in this area are:

1) We built our API first. An Application Programming Interface (API) is the way other programs can interact with each other and share data. We realised early on that we did not want to be all things to all people, and that we wanted to do fewer things but do them better. A comprehensive API is our way to help you do the things that we don’t do.

2) We have started making it easier to import data into Vinsight.

3) We are listening to what other programs and services our customers are using and where appropriate, integrating with those. Our first example is our Xero Integration.

4) We are looking at other ways to help you share your data with your business partners and customers. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this.

Keep an eye out for future blogs about other major issues we uncover in trying to manage a successful wine business.

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Below the “Save”, “Edit” and “Cancel” button area on a detail view for any object, there is a bar labelled “Activity”. If you expand this view, you will be shown a log of all the actions that have happened to the object, who did them and when.

If you expand the “show detail…” link, it will show you the detailed changes that were made to that object:

So now if someone deletes all the wine in your vessel overnight, you will be able to see exactly who did it and when it happened!

The post We know what you did last night appeared first on Vinsight.

Are you ready? Here we go:

It may be small, but it’s very powerful…

so please read the instructions carefully:

http://docs.vinsight.net/winemaking/in-the-winery/winery-operations/#undo

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You can choose to have the app remember who you are for just the day or for two weeks. If you explicitly log off, then the app will forget who you are again. Hopefully this improves everyone’s productivity as you won’t be spending half the day logging back in to Vinsight every time you want to use it.

The post Will you remember me when I’m gone? appeared first on Vinsight.

Hi guys,

With today’s upgrade we’ve added a new graphing system for Lab Analyses. It lets you easily view the progress of things like your ferments and maturity monitoring. Here’s an example graph:

You can configure what lines to show for which Analysis Sets by editing any Analysis Set and ticking “Show on Graph”:

The old graphs use Flash Player to draw in your web browser, however this is incompatible with many mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad. The new graphs use a different method of drawing, SVGs, that works across all devices. We will be working on porting the old graph format over to the new one to enhance your Vinsight experience on mobile devices and tablets.

-Eddie

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Today we released a new version of the Vinsight app, and I wanted to share with you a cool little feature I managed to sneak in before we deployed. This was a request from a customer but we decided to make it accessible to everyone.

The feature is being able to insert all Vessels of a certain batch to a Winery Operation table for mass processing. For example, if you wanted to empty out all the wine from a certain batch code, previously you would have had to go find all the vessels with that batch code, and for each one, remove the volume and insert to the table.

Now it’s really easy! You just need to click on this icon near the "insert" link in the table:

Which will open up this box:

Then all you have to do is select the batch code you want. Vinsight will tell you how many vessels this relates to and their total current volumes:

Choose what action you are doing to the vessels. (Later on we will also have an "Addition" option for mass additions)

You can enter a volume to transfer or leave it blank to either completely empty or fill the vessels.

Press the button and voila!

The post Batch Inserting Vessels In a Winery Operation appeared first on Vinsight.

Knowing that you are making a return on every bottle you sell and the margin on that sale is critical in measuring your return on investment. The hardest part of that equation is working out the cost per bottle. With that in mind we have released a new version of Vinsight that is heavily focused on the costs side of running a winery. These new features are only enabled for subscription levels Medium or higher.

Receiving fruit and juice

In the harvest and bulk receival detail views, we have added a new section called "Cost Information" where you can put in how much the fruit or juice cost you. As you insert values, the other values will automatically work forward or backwards to calculate the correct cost information for unit cost or total cost. You can also go back later and edit the cost information, which will redistribute the prices of everything that came from that harvest or bulk receival automatically.

As well as this, we have added a "Where Is It Now?" tab to both harvests and bulk receivals that allows you to see exactly where the fruit or juice is at the moment, whether some of it is in vessels, or even in bottles and despatched out. There is also a helpful summary of the cost per litre/gallon of the crushed fruit or juice:

Looking in Vessels

To go with this, we have also added a "by Source" and "Cost Summary" tab to the Vessel composition area. These allow you to see where the contents of the vessel have come from, as well as the related prices and an overall unit cost.

The "Cost Summary" tab takes the totals from the "by Source" tab and adds them to the cost of any additives to the vessel, resulting in a more accurate unit cost for the vessel:

If you want to see this information in a printed format, check out the Vessel Composition report, either on a tank by tank basis using "Report type: Composition", or for a full report, use "Report type: Cost Summary"

Bulk Despatches

We have also added a "by Source" tab to the Bulk Despatches view that has the same functionality as the one on the Vessel detail. At this point there is no "Cost Summary" for bulk despatches but that will be added later as and when it is useful.

The post Profit is important! appeared first on Vinsight.

Analysis Sets
* You can control the number of analysis type codes that you see by creating and using Analysis Sets. We have created some default ones for you e.g: Maturity Monitoring, Ferment Charts, Finished Wines and a Default set. Feel free to add, amend or delete these as you like.

Harvesting
* Updating either the Sub Block or the Quantity of an uncompleted Harvest with update the matching areas of any related Winery Operation.

Winery Operation Variance Controls
* If your operation fails validation because you are losing or gaining too much wine, you can now override non-fatal variances warnings by entering a variance reason code.

Purchase Orders
* There is a brand new Purchase Order print out for you to get ordering any of supplies needed in the winery or vineyard.
* Furthermore receiving a Purchase Order or despatching a Sales Order now updates the inventory levels.

Vessel Settings
* You can now create, edit and use Vessel Groups and Vessel Types which gives you better control of vessel capapcities, differences between barrels, tanks and ferments etc.

Others
*There are also numerous other bug fixes and improvements.
 
Beta program for new reporting features
We would like to invite anyone wishing to try our reporting features that we are introducing into our medium subscription level. This is the availability of pdf based reports where you can set the criteria of what data you want to see in the reports. If this is of interest then drop us an email and we can put you onto our beta testing program.
 
Expired trials
If you have had a trial that has expired in the past and would like to have a look at our latest features, please drop us an email and we would be happy to reset this for you.

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