---
title: Affordable software for breweries selling direct to pubs
Metadescription: Entry-tier brewery software is production only. Why a pub order desk is a separate purchase, and what keg tracking and duty returns still need.
author: Dan Edwards
author_role: Founder
author_url: https://danedwardsdeveloper.com
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-edwards-developer
published: 2026-08-26
updated: 2026-09-27
---

Token estimate: ~2,900

# Affordable software for breweries selling direct to pubs

The affordable end of brewery software is the production half. Entry tiers carry recipes, brew logs, fermentation and the excise report, while sales, customer management and delivery planning sit a tier or two above - and that upper half is what a brewery self-distributing to pubs touches every week. Brewery management software and wholesale ordering software are two separate purchases, and a brewery with twenty pub accounts usually needs the second one first.

By **[Dan Edwards](https://wholesalehandler.com/about)**, Founder.

## 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](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/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.

| How the bill is calculated | What makes it rise |
| --- | --- |
| Per user, or per concurrent user | Hiring. A second person in the office at the same time is a second subscription |
| Annual production volume, in hectolitres or barrels | Brewing more. The order desk costs the same at five accounts or fifty |
| A percentage of the orders placed through the trade portal | Selling more. The portal takes a cut of the revenue it carries |
| Quote only, with no published price | Whatever the renewal conversation decides. Nothing is published to hold the vendor to |
| A flat published fee | Nothing |

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](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/why-is-wholesale-software-so-expensive) sets out what the seat and percentage models are charging for, and [a commission-free alternative to EeBria](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/eebria-alternative-for-self-distributing-breweries) 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](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/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](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/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](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/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.

## Q&A

**Q: Is self-distribution to pubs and bars legal in the United States?**
A: In most states, yes, usually up to a production cap measured in barrels per year. Around thirty-five states permit some form of brewery self-distribution, sixteen of them with no volume limit at all, and caps elsewhere run from a couple of thousand barrels to twenty-five thousand. A few states, Florida among them, still require a distributor. Check your own state before building a direct pub book.

**Q: Does a standing order use the price it was set up with?**
A: No. A standing order stores the products and quantities, not the prices. It is priced at the moment it fires, so a duty rise pushed through the price list applies to the next delivery without anyone editing the schedule.

**Q: Does marking the brewery as closed stop standing orders placing?**
A: No. A closure does not suppress a standing order, so a brewery shutting for a week needs to pause or skip the affected schedules as well as marking the closure.

**Q: Can a pub download its own invoice as a PDF?**
A: No. The invoice PDF is emailed to the pub when the brewery finalises it. There is no download action on the customer's side of the portal.

**Q: Can two people at the brewery be signed in at once?**
A: No. Wholesale Handler is one sign-in per business. That is a real limit for a brewery with an office manager and a sales rep, and it is the flip side of not charging per seat.