You’ve spent countless hours blending, stabilizing, and filtering your wine to perfection, and now the time has come to push it over the finish line and into some bottles! With Blended, this process is easier than ever. Let's break down the different steps and highlight a few tips and tricks to make your recording and tracking of finished goods a breeze.
Step one: Bottling your wine
First things first, let's get this wine bottled! From your production page, find the wine lot you are ready to bottle and select its check box. You’ll now see your operations menu highlighted, and you can select “Bottling” from the list.
You’ll now be in your bottling screen, where we can enter all the important data for this bottling run.
Ensure you select the correct date so we can map to the correct month on your TTB report.
Next, you’ll want to tell us what size container you are bottling into. Don't see the one you need? No problem! You can easily create a new container size on the fly by typing into the drop-down menu and then entering your container volume. Once you save the operation, that size option will now be available in your drop-down menu in the future. Bottling 750 mL bottles AND 1.5 L on the same day? Also, not a problem, just hit the plus sign on the right-hand side and add in as many container types as you need.
Now that we have our container sizes set, enter in the quantity bottled and the system will do the math for you on how much volume you have bottled and how much is left.
Tori's Tip: Pay extra attention to the check box underneath the bottle sizes. This box should only remain selected if you are bottling the entire wine lot as it will signal the system to record the remaining volume as a loss. If you are only bottling a portion of the lot, either unselect this box or split the volume you will be bottling ahead of time.
Now let's talk packaging materials: Did you know you can track your packaging materials in blended? Simply add them into the materials section of your system, and then you can easily add them into your bottling operation by selecting “Add item” at the bottom of the screen. You’ll be prompted to select the type of material (E.g., glass, cork, label), then choose the actual item, specific batch, and quantity used during the bottling run. Add in as many line items here as you need, and the system will remove the quantities from your inventory upon recording the bottling event.
Tori's Tip: If you enter a quantity used that exceeds the amount you have in your inventory for a particular batch, the system will display a notification and show your current inventory of that material.
Feel free to add in any additional notes you may have for the bottling run, hit record, and you will have successfully bottled your wine! If you also track your finished good SKUs inventory in Blended through our case goods module, or are curious how Blended can help you manage your inventory, stick around for part two.
Costing Considerations for Bottling Multiple Formats
When bottling multiple formats (e.g., 750ml and magnums) within the same bottling form in Blended, the system will average the costs across those formats. This results in a single blended COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) value for the entire bottling run.
If you want to maintain distinct COGS values for each format—such as keeping separate costs for your standard 750ml bottles and magnums—you should split the lot before bottling. This ensures that each format’s packaging and associated costs are tracked independently, allowing for format-specific COGS reporting.
Step Two: Case good inventory tracking
We’ve bottled our wine, but we aren’t quite done yet! We want to ensure that our newly bottled wine is accurately tracked and accounted for before it reaches its new destination. Let’s assign a SKU to this wine and track it through the next stage.
Go to the case goods section of your system, where you will find your newly bottled wine in the bottled lots section. Select your wine and click on “Assign SKUs”.
Now you can type your SKU name into the drop-down menu to create a new SKU.
You will also have a few other optional fields you can fill out
If you need to adjust your bottles per case or cases per pallet, you can do so at this stage; this will ensure that we give you an accurate breakdown of pallets, cases, and single bottles available.
We know many wineries immediately taxpay their finished case goods. If this is the case for you, you can select the “Tax Paid” box here and save yourself an extra step later!
Finally, you have the option to specify the storage location where the SKU will reside.
Now you’ll have full visibility of your SKU in the system and can manage your levels in the system as well as have full TTB reporting while it still lives in the system. You can also really easily view which wines are still in bond, tax paid, or in one of your storage locations, by jumping into any of the tabs across the top of the screen.
Tori's Tip: Want to look at a historical view of your case goods inventory? You can adjust the view date on any of the tabs within the case goods module, and it will revert the inventory levels back to what they were at the chosen date.
Once you have created your SKU, managing your inventory is a breeze! Simply select your SKU(s) and select one of the highlighted operation options to reconcile, move locations, send to tax paid, or back into bond.
Step Three: Removing inventory
It’s time to say goodbye to your finished inventory. To manage this in Blended, simply select your SKU(s) and then either select “Log sales and usage” or “Dispatch out”
Log sales and usage will allow you to tell the system how much of a particular SKU you have sent out and will allow you to select the reasoning, so everything flows perfectly on your TTB report.
Dispatch out will allow you to send out your SKU(s) and generate a BOL for you. Simply select your dispatch type, enter your shipment quantities and customer information, and the system will do the rest. No more handwriting your BOLs!