Wholesale Handler
Brewery management software and wholesale ordering software are two different purchases
A brewery platform is built around what comes out of the fermenter. Its modules are recipes, tanks, batches, lot traceability and the excise report, and the trade order desk is one module among a dozen. The cheapest published tier of a brewery platform is usually production only, with sales, deliveries, costing and accounting named as belonging to the full version rather than the entry one.
A brewery self-distributing to pubs has the opposite weighting. Production is a handful of brews a month against a whiteboard. The order desk is sixty free houses, each on its own price, each ordering against the day the van runs their patch. How small breweries take orders from pubs without a distributor covers the ordering process itself.
How the bill is calculated decides what growth costs
The monthly figure matters less than the axis it sits on, because the axis is what moves when the brewery grows.
The percentage model is the one that bites a self-distributor hardest, because the whole point of dropping the wholesaler was to stop paying a margin to the middle. A portal charging a cut of trade revenue reinstates a smaller version of the same deduction, and it grows exactly as the pub book grows. Why is wholesale software so expensive sets out what the seat and percentage models are charging for, and a commission-free alternative to EeBria puts a figure on that deduction for a brewery already selling through one.
Quote-only pricing is not automatically worse, but it removes the one thing a small brewery can act on. A published number can be compared before a demo call; a quote cannot.
Some platforms gate the order desk behind a tier, and some do not
The tier structures differ enough that the category cannot be summarised in one line.
- Ekos does not gate it. Keg tracking, TTB reporting, sales and customer management and the B2B order hub are in all three of its beer and cider tiers. What the higher tiers sell is reporting depth and a second production facility. The catch is that no price is published at all.
- Beer30 gates it. The entry bundle is production; outside sales, live inventory, delivery planning and customer management start at the second bundle, and accounting at the third. Its newest cut-down product is explicit that sales, deliveries, accounting and costing exist only in the full version.
- Ollie gates it. The lower of its two main tiers is operations; sales and accounting arrive above it. The published pricing page sells the model rather than the figure.
- BrewMan charges per concurrent user for the platform, then meters its trade portal separately as a percentage of the revenue running through it.
- Breww prices the platform on annual production volume with unlimited users, and its trade store, once charged as a percentage of order value, is now included.
So the practical question for a brewery is not which platform is cheapest. It is whether the tier that unlocks pub ordering is one the brewery would otherwise have bought.
Keg tracking is the feature breweries will not drop, and Wholesale Handler has none
Casks and kegs go out on deposit and have to come back. Knowing which pub is holding how many firkins, and for how long, is a physical asset ledger rather than a money one. Where a brewery platform publishes a tier breakdown, container tracking sits in the entry tier rather than in an upsell, which says how non-optional the trade treats it. It is also a category of its own: dedicated keg trackers sell as standalone subscriptions, flat or metered per keg per month, with barcode labels and a phone camera doing the scanning. One vendor's published case study puts keg loss down by more than eighty per cent and keg cycles up by more than double.
Wholesale Handler does not track kegs, casks, containers or deposits in any form. A deposit can ride on an invoice as a line item, and that is the whole of it. There is no empties ledger, no per-pub container balance and no reconciliation.
That gap is survivable because keg tracking is sold separately. A brewery can run a keg tracker and an order desk side by side without buying a production ERP to get both.
Duty returns are a compliance job, not an ordering one
Excise reporting runs on a statutory calendar, and brewery platforms do it because they already hold the production numbers it draws on.
In the United States, a brewer files a Brewer's Report of Operations either monthly or quarterly depending on beer excise liability, and there is no annual option for the operational report - a fact that catches out small brewers who file their income tax once a year. Excise tax returns run on their own schedule. In the United Kingdom, the EX46 beer duty return is due every calendar month, by the fifteenth of the following month, and has to be filed even in a month where nothing is owed. Small Producer Relief is calculated before the production year starts and applied from the point of production, so more than one relief rate can apply inside a single duty band.
Wholesale Handler calculates no duty and files nothing. It has no brewing, fermentation, tank or batch management either. Duty reporting stays with a brewery platform or an accountant.
What a flat-fee order desk covers for a brewery
Wholesale Handler is a flat price with no per-user, per-order or commission charge and no tier that holds a feature back, and it is free up to 3 customers without a card. Flat-fee wholesale ordering software covers the pricing model itself.
What it does for a pub book:
- Per-pub pricing. Each free house sees only its own price list, so a long-standing account can beat a new one without either seeing the other. How to charge different prices to different wholesale customers covers how the lists are built.
- A cutoff per delivery day, set as a lead time before that day. A Monday delivery can close on Friday while a Thursday delivery stays open until the night before, and once a day's cutoff passes that day stops being orderable.
- Delivery days per pub, assigned through order profiles, so a pub only sees the days the van reaches its patch.
- Minimum order values and delivery charges, for the three-keg floor and the drops that sit outside the free radius.
- Standing orders from weekly to four-weekly, placed automatically at the cutoff and re-priced at the moment they fire, with pause and skip. The always-on house lager fits this; the rotating guest cask does not, and stays a manual line each week. What is a standing order in wholesale covers the mechanism.
- A production schedule with a printable make sheet. Every order for a delivery date totals by product, so the quantity to prepare is one number rather than sixty order forms, and the printed sheet carries a tick box per line.
- Packing slips without prices, so a delivery note can go in the cellar without the pub's rate on it.
- A storefront each pub signs into, plus bulk import for moving an existing customer and product list in.
What Wholesale Handler does not do
- Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule. A merchant selects processed orders, they collate into one draft per customer, and finalising emails the PDF.
- No card payments of any kind, and no automated payment chasing. Payment is tracked as a two-sided handshake: the pub records that it has paid, the brewery confirms it against the bank.
- No credit notes against a sent invoice.
- No driver run sheet and no route sequencing. The make sheet says what to prepare, not what order to drive in.
- A placed order cannot be edited. It is cancelled and re-placed.
- Data export covers invoiced line items only.
- Fifty customers and five hundred products.
