Managing Your Brewery Finances: Creating and Running an Accounting System – FREE

Before you dive into cost of goods sold (COGS), cost accounting or margins, you need to know how to get good data—to know you can trust the numbers coming out of your accounting system.

You will start by exploring a few key accounting concepts and identifying administrative resources to help you “be everything to everybody.” Then you will create your accounting structure by determining the businesses within your brewery and how best to track them in the system. A chart of accounts (COA) can give you a lot of information, and you will create a customized COA that will enable you to easily see your brewery’s gross margin.

Next, you will identify effective “period close” or discrete spans of time, and establish a financial statement review. You will learn how to reconcile bank statements and create journal entries for accruals and pre-pays. Finally, you will explore how a budget becomes a forecast and how to use a 360 degree forecast to understand each component of your brewery.

Once all of these steps are in place, you will be able to generate accurate, actionable data that will drive brewery decisions. You will also be able to translate that data into an understandable format for management and other key stakeholders

Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

  • Identify administrative resources
  • Describe key administrative concepts (taxation, insurance, HR, accounting, sales tax, excise tax, etc.)
  • Determine the businesses within your brewery and how best to track them in an accounting system
  • Create a customized chart of accounts (COA)
  • Reconcile bank statements and create journal entries for accruals and pre-pays
  • Complete a financial statement review of your books
  • Articulate how a budget becomes a forecast
  • Describe levels of forecasting and types of forecasts, and how all forecasts work together
  • Conduct a 360 view forecast to understand each component of the brewery
  • Generate accurate financial data to inform brewery decisions, and translate the data for key stakeholders