The Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly & Annual Tasks Every Liquor Store Has to Manage — and How Bevly Makes Them Easier

Running a liquor store involves a lot more than ringing up customers and stocking shelves.

Every day, liquor store owners and managers have to receive deliveries, update inventory, monitor pricing, pay distributors, check stock levels, manage employees, and keep the store operating.

Every week, there are products to reorder, sales to review, inventory problems to investigate, and new products to consider.

Every month and quarter, owners need to analyze margins, identify dead inventory, audit stock, evaluate category performance, and prepare for changes in seasonal demand.

And every year, there are major inventory counts, financial reviews, purchasing decisions, and planning for the year ahead.

Individually, many of these tasks don’t seem overwhelming. Together, they can consume hundreds of hours every year.

That’s exactly the type of repetitive work that technology should eliminate.

Bevly is designed specifically for liquor retailers and automates many of the tasks that traditionally require hours of manual work.

Here’s what the operating calendar of a liquor store can look like—and how Bevly can make it dramatically easier.

Daily Liquor Store Tasks

Some of the most time-consuming work in liquor retail happens every single day.

Receiving Deliveries

A distributor truck arrives.

Now someone has to verify what was delivered, compare it against the invoice, enter the products into the POS system, update inventory quantities, account for new costs, and put everything away.

When this process is handled manually, receiving a large delivery can become a significant project.

And liquor stores don’t necessarily receive one delivery at a time.

Depending on the market, a retailer may work with multiple beer, wine, and spirits distributors, with deliveries arriving throughout the week.

How Bevly Helps: Automated Receiving

Bevly’s Automated Receiving dramatically reduces the amount of manual work required when products arrive.

Instead of employees spending substantial amounts of time manually entering products and updating inventory, Bevly helps automate the receiving process so inventory can be updated much faster.

That means employees can spend less time entering data and more time actually running the store.

Daily Task: Entering Distributor Invoices

Invoices are another major source of repetitive administrative work.

Every delivery creates information that eventually needs to make its way into the retailer’s system.

• Products
• Quantities
• Costs
• Product information
• Inventory adjustments

Manually entering that information doesn’t just take time. Every additional keystroke creates another opportunity for an error.

How Bevly Helps: Automated Invoicing

Bevly’s Automated Invoicing is designed to eliminate much of this manual data entry.

For retailers using Fintech, for example, invoices can flow into Bevly rather than requiring store employees to manually recreate the invoice inside their POS system.

A process that could traditionally take 30, 45, 60 minutes, or longer can potentially be handled in a fraction of that time.

That doesn’t just save time on one invoice.

Think about the cumulative effect.

If a store spends several hours every week processing invoices, eliminating most of that manual work can potentially return hundreds of hours to the business over the course of a year.

Daily and Weekly Task: Paying Distributors

Buying inventory creates another administrative responsibility: paying for it.

Liquor retailers may have relationships with numerous distributors and suppliers, which means invoices, due dates, payment requirements, and records all need to be managed.

How Bevly Helps: Automated Payments

Bevly’s Automated Payments can streamline another part of the purchasing cycle.

Instead of treating purchasing, receiving, invoicing, inventory, and payments as completely separate administrative processes, automation can help connect these workflows.

The objective is simple:

Buy the product. Receive the product. Update the system. Pay for the product.

With as little unnecessary manual intervention as possible.

Daily Task: Checking the Store When You’re Not There

Liquor store ownership doesn’t necessarily end when the owner leaves the building.

Owners want to know:

• How are sales today?
• What’s happening at the store?
• Do I need to check something?
• How is the business performing?

Traditionally, getting those answers could mean calling the store, texting an employee, waiting until you return, or remotely accessing a complicated computer setup.

How Bevly Helps: Remote Access

Bevly gives retailers Remote Access to their business.

That means owners don’t necessarily have to be standing behind the counter to understand what is happening inside their store.

For an owner with multiple locations, this becomes even more important.

Instead of physically being everywhere, the owner can have greater visibility into the business from wherever they are.

Weekly Liquor Store Tasks

Daily operations keep the store functioning.

Weekly analysis helps determine whether the store is functioning profitably.

Weekly Task: Deciding What to Reorder

Ordering inventory sounds simple until you consider how many SKUs a liquor store may carry.

• Beer
• Wine
• Vodka
• Tequila
• Bourbon
• Scotch
• RTDs
• Craft beer
• Seltzers
• Cognac
• Liqueurs
• Mixers

And potentially thousands of individual products within those categories.

Retailers constantly have to decide what should be reordered, what shouldn’t, and what new products deserve shelf space.

The goal isn’t simply to keep shelves full.

The goal is to keep shelves full of products that sell.

How Bevly Helps: Better Inventory Visibility

Because Bevly connects sales and inventory information, retailers can make purchasing decisions using actual store data rather than relying entirely on memory or visual shelf checks.

That can help retailers determine what is selling, what needs to be reordered, and where inventory dollars should be invested.

Weekly Task: Finding New Products

There is another side of purchasing that is easy to overlook.

What aren’t you carrying?

Maybe customers are looking for a new RTD.

Maybe there’s a trending tequila.

Maybe a distributor has a craft beer your customers would love.

Maybe there’s an interesting wine that could deliver a better margin than another bottle currently occupying the shelf.

You can’t sell a product if you don’t know it’s available.

How Bevly Helps: The Beverage Journal

Bevly’s Beverage Journal helps retailers see products that are available to them.

Instead of relying entirely on distributor representatives, printed catalogs, spreadsheets, emails, and word of mouth, retailers can use the Beverage Journal to discover products they could potentially bring into their stores.

This makes product discovery part of the inventory strategy.

Ask yourself:

What are customers looking for that you aren’t currently selling?

The answer could represent your next profitable SKU.

Weekly and Monthly Task: Monitoring Profit Margins

Sales don’t tell the entire story.

A store can increase revenue while its profitability gets worse.

Costs change.

Distributor pricing changes.

Deals expire.

Retail prices stay the same.

And suddenly a product that once generated a healthy margin isn’t generating nearly as much profit.

With thousands of SKUs, expecting someone to manually monitor the margin on every product is unrealistic.

How Bevly Helps: Profit Margin Alerts

Bevly’s Profit Margin Alerts help retailers identify potential margin problems without requiring them to manually inspect every SKU.

That can be extremely important.

Imagine a product increases in cost but continues selling at its old retail price.

Every sale could be quietly reducing the store’s profitability.

Multiply that across dozens—or hundreds—of products and margin leakage can become significant.

Profit Margin Alerts help owners identify these situations so they can investigate and make pricing decisions.

Instead of discovering margin problems months later, retailers can respond much faster.

Monthly Task: Finding Dead Inventory

One of the most expensive places in a liquor store isn’t necessarily the checkout counter.

It’s the shelf.

More specifically, it’s the shelf space occupied by products that aren’t selling.

A case of slow-moving wine.

A craft beer that stopped selling.

An RTD trend that disappeared.

A premium spirit nobody is buying.

Every one of those products represents money.

The retailer already paid for the inventory.

If it sits there for months, that cash isn’t available to purchase products that could actually be selling.

How Bevly Helps: Dead Products Report

Bevly’s Dead Products Report helps retailers identify products that aren’t moving.

This turns a difficult question—

“What products in my store aren’t selling?”

—into information the retailer can actually act on.

Once dead inventory is identified, the owner can decide what to do with it.

Depending on applicable laws and regulations, that could mean adjusting pricing, changing placement, reducing future orders, using approved promotions, or simply deciding not to reorder the product.

More importantly, the retailer can replace poor-performing inventory with products that have a better chance of generating sales.

That improves inventory productivity.

Monthly and Quarterly Task: Auditing Inventory

Inventory accuracy is one of the biggest challenges in liquor retail.

Products break.

Items get misplaced.

Receiving mistakes happen.

Theft and shrink occur.

Products can be entered incorrectly.

Over time, the quantity shown in the POS system can become different from what is actually sitting on the shelf.

That’s why inventory audits matter.

The problem is that traditional inventory counting can be extremely time-consuming.

How Bevly Helps: Inventory Audits on Your Mobile Phone

Bevly allows retailers to perform Inventory Audits using a mobile phone.

Instead of making inventory counting an enormous administrative project tied to a workstation, employees can move throughout the store and audit inventory from a device they already carry.

That can make cycle counts much more practical.

Rather than waiting until the end of the year to discover inventory discrepancies, retailers can audit sections of the store throughout the year.

For example:

• Monday: Bourbon
• Tuesday: Tequila
• Wednesday: Wine
• Thursday: Craft beer
• Friday: RTDs

Breaking a massive inventory problem into smaller, manageable audits can help maintain better inventory accuracy throughout the year.

Quarterly Task: Reviewing Product Mix

Every few months, liquor store owners should ask a fundamental question:

Are we carrying the right products?

Consumer preferences change.

RTDs become popular.

Tequila brands trend.

Bourbon releases create demand.

Craft beer preferences shift.

Seasonal products come and go.

Wine preferences change.

A product assortment that worked last year—or even last quarter—may not be the optimal assortment today.

Bevly gives retailers information they can use to evaluate sales, inventory, and product availability together.

The Dead Products Report can help identify what should potentially leave.

The Beverage Journal can help identify what could potentially replace it.

That’s a much more strategic approach to inventory management.

Find what’s not selling. Stop tying up cash in it. Find something better.

Quarterly Task: Preparing for Seasonal Demand

Liquor retail is highly seasonal.

Summer brings different demand than winter.

Football season changes purchasing behavior.

Thanksgiving affects wine and spirits.

Christmas and New Year’s can dramatically increase demand for Champagne, sparkling wine, premium spirits, and gift-worthy bottles.

Summer can increase demand for beer, RTDs, tequila, and outdoor-friendly formats.

A retailer shouldn’t wait until the week before a major selling period to start thinking about inventory.

Sales history and inventory information can help owners prepare earlier and make more informed purchasing decisions.

Annual Task: Physical Inventory

For many liquor retailers, annual inventory is one of the least enjoyable events on the calendar.

Thousands of products may need to be counted.

• Bottles
• Cases
• Four-packs
• Six-packs
• Singles
• Wine
• Beer
• Spirits
• Coolers
• Back stock
• Storage rooms

Traditional inventory counts can require significant labor and sometimes involve outside inventory services.

Bevly’s mobile inventory auditing capabilities can make inventory management an ongoing process instead of something that receives attention only once per year.

The more accurate inventory remains throughout the year, the less mysterious the annual count becomes.

Annual Task: Reviewing the Business

At least once per year, every liquor store owner should step away from day-to-day operations and look at the business strategically.

• What categories grew?
• What categories declined?
• Which products generated strong margins?
• Which products occupied shelf space without selling?
• Where did inventory dollars get trapped?
• What products should we stop carrying?
• What products should we add?
• Where are margins being lost?
• What could employees spend less time doing?

These questions are much easier to answer when the retailer has accurate data.

And that points to one of the biggest advantages of automating liquor store operations.

The Real Cost of Manual Work

Suppose a repetitive task takes an employee 30 minutes.

That doesn’t sound significant.

But if the task happens five times per week, that’s 2.5 hours.

Over 52 weeks, that’s approximately 130 hours per year spent on one repetitive process.

Now consider all the repetitive tasks inside a liquor store:

• Receiving
• Invoice entry
• Inventory updates
• Payments
• Inventory counts
• Margin monitoring
• Finding dead products
• Checking store performance
• Searching for products
• Preparing reports

The real question isn’t:

“Can my employees do these tasks?”

Of course they can.

The better question is:

“Why are we paying people to manually perform work that software can automate?”

Give Your Employees Their Time Back

Technology shouldn’t simply replace the cash register.

It should eliminate work.

Every hour an employee spends manually entering invoice information is an hour they aren’t helping customers.

Every hour spent reconciling inventory is an hour they aren’t merchandising the store.

Every hour spent searching through spreadsheets is an hour they aren’t selling.

And every hour an owner spends compiling information is an hour they aren’t making decisions about how to grow the business.

Bevly is designed to reduce that administrative burden.

With features including:

• Automated Invoicing
• Automated Receiving
• Automated Payments
• Dead Products Report
• Mobile Inventory Audits
• Remote Access
• Profit Margin Alerts
• Beverage Journal
• Inventory Management
• Sales and Product Visibility

Bevly helps transform many of the repetitive tasks involved in operating a liquor store from manual processes into automated or significantly faster workflows.

Don’t Just Run Your Liquor Store. Automate It.

Liquor store owners have enough to worry about.

• Customers
• Employees
• Competition
• Distributors
• Pricing
• Inventory
• Margins
• New products
• Seasonality
• Shrink
• Cash flow

Your technology shouldn’t create more work.

It should remove work.

If your employees are still spending hours manually entering invoices, receiving inventory, searching for product information, checking margins, counting inventory, and compiling reports, there may be a much faster way to run your store.

Bevly was built to help liquor retailers automate those processes, improve visibility into their businesses, and spend more time focusing on the decisions that actually require a human being.

Schedule a Bevly demo and see how much time your store could save every day, every week, every month, every quarter, and every year.

Schedule a Bevly Demo