On any given Tuesday, a mid-sized craft brewery is managing dozens of active batches at different stages of fermentation, tracking hops and malt contracts against invoices that haven’t been matched yet, submitting last month’s Brewer’s Report of Operations, reconciling taproom POS data against wholesale distributor orders, and trying to close the books accurately on margins that don’t leave much room for error.
Most breweries outgrow spreadsheets and entry-level accounting tools within their first few years of real growth. The problem isn’t that the tools stop working — it’s that they were never designed to talk to each other.
Production data lives in a brewing system. Inventory lives in a spreadsheet. Compliance data gets compiled manually from both. Financials live in QuickBooks, disconnected from all of it. The result is a brewery running on four to six systems that each hold a different piece of the truth, none of which reconcile automatically.
Brewery ERP software solves this by connecting every operational and financial function in a single platform purpose-built for craft beer production. This guide explains what brewery ERP is, why the disconnected systems problem is more expensive than most breweries realize, and how Crafted ERP gives modern brewery operations the foundation to scale with confidence.
What Is Brewery ERP Software?
Let’s start with the basics. Brewery ERP software is an integrated business management platform that unifies production, inventory, compliance reporting, supply chain and financial management in one system designed specifically for how craft breweries operate. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning — but for breweries, the practical definition is simpler: it’s the system where a batch record automatically updates ingredient inventory, inventory transactions flow into financials, packaging runs trigger compliance data capture, and TTB reports populate from production data rather than manual entry.
Crafted ERP, developed by Doozy Solutions and built in Oracle NetSuite, is an industry-specific brewery ERP platform trusted by hundreds of craft beverage brands worldwide — including Athletic Brewing Co., Fort Point Beer Company, and Burleigh Brewing. It’s not generic manufacturing software adapted for brewing. It was built by industry veterans who understand the difference between a brite tank transfer and a balance sheet entry — and know that in a connected brewery, those two things are the same transaction.
The Real Cost of Disconnected Brewery Systems
Your typical brewery tech stack looks something like this: QuickBooks for accounting, a standalone production tracker, a compliance tool for TTB reporting, taproom POS that’s not connected to inventory, and a collection of spreadsheets holding it all together. This isn’t just inefficient. It makes accurate brewery management structurally impossible.
Running a modern craft brewery means managing complexity that spreadsheets were never built to handle. When each system holds a different piece of the truth, someone has to spend hours every week manually extracting, reconciling and re-entering data across all of them. A mistake in one system requires corrections in every other.
Some questions become functionally unanswerable without a full day of data compilation. Have you ever tried to figure out:
- What did this batch actually cost to brew?
- Which SKUs are generating the highest margin?
- What’s our current ingredient inventory value across all locations?
The 2024 Doozy Solutions Tech Report found that 72% of mid-sized breweries and distilleries struggle with tax reporting and compliance due to fragmented software, and 67% say manual tax data reconciliation consumes time that should be devoted to growth and production. Those aren’t just operational frustrations. They’re direct costs. Staff hours are diverted from the brewery floor to data entry. Compliance risk created by errors in manually compiled reports. Pricing decisions are made based on cost estimates that were outdated before they were completed.
The deeper problem is scale. A brewery can survive on disconnected systems at 2,000 barrels per year. At 10,000 barrels, with a dozen SKUs across multiple formats, three taprooms, a self-distribution operation, and monthly compliance reporting obligations, the administrative overhead required to keep those systems aligned grows faster than the production line does.
The only way to scale a manual operation is to proportionally scale administrative headcount, which is exactly the wrong investment when margins are tight.
What Changes When a Brewery Runs on a Connected ERP
The shift from disconnected tools to brewery ERP software isn’t about adding features — it’s about changing what kind of data the brewery produces. In a fragmented system, data is always historical, assembled after the fact, and incomplete by the time anyone sees it. In a connected ERP, data is current, consistent and actionable.
Here’s what a connected brewery ERP looks like in practice: When a brewer logs a batch transfer in Crafted ERP, tank availability is automatically updated, and ingredient inventory adjusts. Production costs are captured against the batch in real time. When a taproom sells a keg, the system checks committed inventory, allocates stock across channels, and updates financials. When compliance reporting is due, the data is already there — organized, accurate and traceable to the underlying transactions that generated it. Nothing needs to be manually compiled because nothing was ever siloed.
This connected infrastructure directly addresses the questions that brewery leaders, investors and acquirers actually need answered:
- What is our true cost per barrel for this SKU? It’s not an estimate based on last quarter’s averages. You get the actual batch cost, updated in real time as production occurs.
- Are we TTB compliant right now? With automated Brewer’s Reports of Operations generated directly from production data, excise tax rules applied automatically, and COLA status tracked centrally, compliance stops being a monthly crisis and becomes a continuous output.
- What does ingredient inventory actually look like across every location? Brewery ERP software provides lot-level tracking from ingredient receipt through packaging, automatically enforced FEFO rotation, and hop contract balances tracked against actual usage — in real time, across every warehouse and taproom.
- Which beers are actually profitable? Track raw material usage, labor, overhead and packaging costs as production occurs — automatically, not at month-end. Because inventory, procurement and production all feed the same system, profitability by SKU, package format and sales channel is always current.
Brewery ERP Is Built for Beer — Not Retrofitted from Something Else
The reason most breweries eventually look beyond QuickBooks and generic ERP isn’t that those tools are bad — it’s that they weren’t designed for the operational realities of craft beer production.
QuickBooks handles accounting. It has no concept of a Brewer’s Report of Operations, a FEFO lot selector, tank utilization schedules, or a hop contract. Generic ERP handles financials and manufacturing, but it doesn’t understand batch genealogy, alternating proprietorship reporting, multi-format COGS calculations, or three-tier distribution compliance. Adapting either of those tools to brewery operations requires workarounds that create exactly the kind of data fragmentation they were supposed to eliminate.
Crafted ERP was built differently. Fort Point Beer Company replaced QuickBooks and OBeer with Crafted because, as co-founder and CEO Justin Catalana put it: “We’re a manufacturing company but we’re also a hospitality company and a distribution company. Crafted just had a more modern approach to ERP than anything else we evaluated.” Fort Point now schedules production across multiple locations, manages multi-category compliance, and maintains accurate costing and financial records — all in one system.
Athletic Brewing Co. made a similar move when disconnected systems couldn’t keep pace with its growth from startup to one of the largest craft breweries in the U.S. After implementing Crafted, Athletic’s controller Jillian Moccia noted that month-end close time dropped by 10–15%. Enterprise Application Manager Rob Riccio described the shift directly: “Being able to have all of the production activity that you need to inform the financial and operational management of the business is so much different than trying to cobble it together from multiple systems.”
At Burleigh Brewing in Australia, three siloed systems — QuickBooks, Fishbowl and Excel — meant every major decision had to flow through the founders because no one else had a complete view of the business. After moving to Crafted, real-time dashboards empowered their team to make operational decisions independently. COO Scott Lyall described the problem Crafted solved plainly: “We had a hodgepodge of systems that didn’t talk to each other, and at no point could you see the end-to-end supply chain easily.”
Hear more from the #CraftedCommunity.
The Breweries Built to Thrive Are the Ones Building the Foundation Now
The data tells a clear story about where the craft beer market stands. According to the Brewers Association, craft volume declined 3.9% in 2024 — and 2024 was the first year since 2005 that brewery closures outpaced openings nationwide. By mid-2025, that pressure had intensified, with the BA estimating craft volume down another 5% year-over-year and active breweries dropping to their lowest level in years. The BA’s staff economist summed up the new reality plainly: in a mature market, progress is measured in operational efficiency, not volume.
That framing matters for brewery operators making technology decisions right now. The breweries capturing market share in this environment aren’t doing it on volume. They’re doing it on margin discipline, cost visibility and operational agility that their competitors can’t match.
Regulatory complexity continues to increase as breweries add more states, more SKUs, and more compliance obligations. Multi-category expansion into hard seltzer, cider and non-alc adds operational complexity that spreadsheets and disconnected systems aren’t equipped to manage. Managing two taprooms is a different operational challenge than managing one — and the data requirements scale with every location you add.
The next generation of brewery leadership expects modern, data-driven operations, and investors and acquirers evaluate operational transparency as a core component of business value. The breweries that are scaling confidently right now are the ones that built their operational foundation before they needed it — not after the current systems were already failing.
Purpose-built brewery ERP software doesn’t change what great brewing looks like. It makes sure the business running behind that brewing can keep up.
Ready to See What a Connected Brewery Looks Like?
If your operation is outgrowing its current tools — or if you’re already spending too many hours on reconciliation, compliance and data entry that should be automatic — contact us to schedule a strategic call with our team.
Headed to Philadelphia in April? Let’s chat in person at CBC. You can also find us at BrewExpo Booth 1401.
