The winery industry is experiencing a boom in direct-to-consumer (DTC) shipments. Yet solutions with limited functionality such as QuickBooks and Excel can inhibit your capacity to go for growth, especially when supply chain disruption is a daily reality.
Most wineries use QuickBooks for financials today, but most also understand the imperative to become more efficient and evolve toward a fully integrated system that supports their modern, complex business needs.
Wineries need a solution to help them succeed with DTC integration, ensure data protection and improve customer service. They also need a solution with which they can be agile as the industry endures challenges.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with VinPoint is a mature wine business management offering with the functionality wineries need to grow and remain competitive in today’s market. With it, you can achieve efficiency and optimization in operations.
- Experience user-friendly, successful DTC integration
- Improve decision making with real-time data and visibility
- Improve customer service with data and business intelligence across operations
- Ensure data protection against challenges such as natural disasters
Basics of Life with Business Central
Business Central offers the core pieces of what you need with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package, including financial management, sales and cash management, supply chain operations, and reporting and analytics. While you don’t need to take on these capabilities all at once, having them available means you can grow and scale as your business changes.
With Business Central, users get the benefits of working on a Cloud-based solution. Such a solution reduces risks within a business, reducing responsibilities related to backups, disaster recovery, new infrastructure purchases and infrastructure maintenance.
When you lift and shift your infrastructure into the Cloud, it will be accessible from anywhere and you won’t need physical infrastructure. You won’t have to perform expensive, time-consuming upgrades, as upgrades are pushed out automatically without interrupting business. Your core business applications, history, client information and more will be safe and maintained. You’ll also gain agility, and you’ll be better able to focus on day-to-day business and increasing profitability.
Using Business Central also means you can leverage Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Azure and more. Microsoft has invested in ensuring these business applications work together seamlessly.
Keep in mind that moving to the Cloud doesn’t have to be a full lift and shift. You may opt to move an individual work stream, such as finance or winemaking, into a hosted application. And you may opt to move your infrastructure in phases.
Now Add VinPoint to the Equation
VinPoint adds winery functionality. It is integrated directly into Dynamics 365, embedded within the core application. It adds capabilities for production, such as winemaking, vineyard management, bottling, quality and laboratory management.
VinPoint’s industry-specific functionalities interact with and expand on what the core application does. For instance, you can track certain elements within the CRM functionality of Business Central without needing an extended third party.
VinPoint with Business Central also allows you to:
- Do more with your data using Power BI for analytics and reports.
- Gain mobility, such as the ability to log orders through a web portal on a phone or iPad.
- Provide role-based dashboards for specific job functions.
- Scale and grow as your business changes
VinPoint includes a direct-to-consumer integration that allows for quick and easy import of website and tasting room sales information from popular providers like Commerce7, WineDirect and eCellar. Sales transactions and the accompanying cash transactions are posted into Business Central with the flexibility to handle whatever shipping methodology you choose.
Additionally, excise tax data gets created in VinPoint whenever you move inventory for any reason. When TTB reports are due, you simply run a report on the data already collected for you. This ability eliminates manual work and the risk of error that comes with it.
As an example of the functionality of Business Central and VinPoint, this offering makes inventory management, tracking and reporting more seamless for the industry. It is a high-powered financial system with winery information layered throughout. You can see specifics such as alcohol percentage, vintage, varietal, vineyard and brand.
When you navigate your inventory, you can see quantity on hand and quantity available of different vintages and products. They’ll be displayed in relevant units of measure, such as bottles, gallons and liters. If applicable, you’ll see relevant excise taxes classifications.
You can also easily report on specific inventory traits, from the vintage or varietal to the industry-tailored units of measurement. Further, in your system, you can easily account for and track sales of gift boxes, corporate gifts, tasting room items, package offerings and more.
There is an agile configuration that allows you to easily adapt to changing requirements. For instance, when you need to create a new vintage each year in the system, it has a wizard that simply rolls those vintages forward, taking static attributes and allowing you to change what’s necessary.
Affording Business Central and VinPoint at Any Size
People tend to believe that a true financial system such as Dynamics is only for large enterprise companies, but it’s more affordable than ever due to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Paying a monthly fee greatly reduces the upfront investment required, allowing wineries to access the technology more readily and affordably.
It’s important to prioritize proper change management as you move from a solution like QuickBooks, so you can ensure your teams understand and adopt the new technology. For instance, you might start with the most essential pieces and build onto your system as they adjust. From day one, all you’ll need to start with is financial management with some of the compliance pieces.
Business Central delivers an all-in-one solution to allow your business to grow. With the additional use of VinPoint, you’ll have a proven wine management solution that helps you save time on inventory tracking, reporting and more. Download this video to hear first-hand from Vintage Wine Estates about how this solution and our partnership has helped their winery.
