Nine weeks from now, your books close on 2026. Most beverage producers will spend those weeks on mechanics: counting inventory, chasing invoices, reconciling excise filings, and waiting on a P&L that arrives later than anyone would like.
I closed a lot of years as a CFO, and the pattern rarely changed. The team survives the close, exhales, and carries every unresolved problem into January. Year-end is one of the few moments when leadership can step back far enough to judge whether the systems, processes, and data work. A year-end beverage operations review puts that moment to use.
This year the review carries a deadline. A growing list of vendors has sent end-of-life notices to beverage producers, and the platform underlying several beverage-specific systems is approaching end of life. If a notice landed in your inbox, you already know why this matters. If none has, the questions below still apply.
Where Should You Start Your Year-End Beverage Operations Review?
Start with your workarounds. Every producer has them: the spreadsheet that bridges production and accounting, the weekly reconciliation one person owns, the report nobody trusts until a human has checked it. Each began as a reasonable fix. Over 12 months, they stack up, and the stack becomes how you run the business.
List every manual step between a batch leaving the tank, barrel, or cellar and a number landing in your financials. Then ask who owns each step, how long it takes, and what happens the week that person takes vacation. Those answers show you where the year’s errors entered, and they usually trace back to the same few gaps in your data.
Your Cost Numbers Deserve Suspicion
Next, test the financial picture. Does your COGS calculation reflect what you spent on grain, fruit, packaging, labor, and overhead? Or does it rest on standard costs set in January that nobody revisited? Is your inventory valued correctly, including the liquid in barrels and tanks? Does the P&L show actual production costs, or approximations that firm up weeks after close?
Approximations feel harmless until they drive pricing. If a product costs more to make than your spreadsheet says, you have spent a year selling it at a margin that does not exist. Collin McDonnell, CEO and co-founder of HenHouse Brewing Company, describes the payoff: “Actually understanding what drives cost in beer empowers us to make decisions around that, make investments around that, and to create more profitable beer in the long term.”
The Brewers Association’s cost of goods sold resource offers an excellent reference point for this process.
Could Your Compliance Records Survive an Audit?
Reactive compliance looks fine until someone asks to see the records. Pull your TTB reports, state excise filings, and lot traceability records, and ask whether you could defend each one tomorrow. Do the numbers tie back to production and inventory without a weekend of reconstruction?
The regulations leave little room for improvisation. TTB’s distilled spirits plant rules, for example, require daily records of materials produced, received, or used in production, and brewers and winemakers face parallel recordkeeping requirements under their own parts of the federal regulations. If you assemble those records at month-end from three sources, you carry compliance exposure no matter how clean the filing looks.
Your System Should Have Changed a Decision This Year
Here is the technology question I would ask first: what decision would you have made differently in 2026 if the right data had reached you sooner? Maybe a price change, a purchasing commitment, a new SKU, or a hire. If you can name one, your system has fallen behind your business.
The data to answer that question usually exists. It sits in different places: purchasing holds one set of numbers, production holds another, and accounting reconciles the two weeks after the moment to decide has passed. Picture a price change decided on a standard cost set in January. Nobody learns the real margin until the books close.
Technology closes that gap when production, inventory, costing, compliance, and financials share one set of records. Costs update as purchases and production post. Inventory carries a current value. Compliance reports draw on the same transactions as your financials. The number you need in March is the number sitting in the system in March.
Those same records decide whether AI helps you. Features that flag anomalies or sharpen forecasts only work on clean, AI-ready data. Without it, the software delivers confident answers built on unreliable inputs. If your current system cannot supply that foundation, you have a decision to make, and a vendor’s calendar may already be making it for you.
What Does an End-of-Life Notice Do to Your Timeline?
Vendor end-of-life notices add urgency. Once a vendor stops patching a system, the risk lands on your audit fees, cyber insurance, and valuation. Auditors who cannot rely on your IT controls test more transactions, and the extra hours show up in your fee. Many cyber policies make basic patching a condition of coverage, so a breach on an unsupported system can end with a denied claim. Acquirers run diligence on the same system, and what they find tends to reprice a deal.
Bill Evert, a Doozy Solutions board member and cybersecurity specialist, argues that running unsupported ERP software belongs in the finance conversation. That conversation also needs a calendar.
Planning for software end-of-life takes months. A thorough transition can run 12 to 18 months, so even if you sign a contract today, you won’t complete a migration by year-end. The decision to start is the part that cannot wait, because every month between a vendor’s support date and your go-live date is a month on a system that no longer receives patches.
The weeks you have left still count. Use them to build the plan: list the workarounds from your review, name an owner for the project, decide which records belong in the new system, and ask any implementation partner for a realistic timeline in writing. Clean data migration matters as much as the destination, because a new system inherits every flaw you carry over.
How Crafted ERP Answers These Questions
Crafted ERP puts production, inventory, costing, compliance, and financials in one system, so every answer above comes from one set of records. No set of spreadsheets to maintain, and no month-end reconciliation to run before you can trust a number.
Crafted is built in Oracle NetSuite by former brewers, distillers, and winemakers working alongside NetSuite architects. That mix shapes how Crafted handles costing and compliance reporting: both follow how production actually works on the floor. Because Crafted is native to NetSuite, NetSuite’s own AI capabilities run against those same records.
What Is the One Question to Answer Before January 1?
The producers who run the tightest operations treat year-end as a forcing function for planning. They enter January with their open decisions made and an owner named for each fix.
If you take one question into your year-end meetings, make it this one: can my current system run the business I plan to have in 2027? Run it with accurate costs, audit-ready compliance, and a vendor that still patches the software?
If the answer takes more than a second to give, you have your January agenda. I would rather you start that conversation in October with a plan than in March with a problem.
Contact our team to set up a demo or a business analysis, and we will walk through your data, costs, and compliance records in response to each question above.
About Jeremy King
Jeremy King is CEO and co-founder of Doozy Solutions, the team behind Crafted ERP. He started Doozy because the craft beverage industry had outgrown the tools available to run it, then built a team of former brewers, distillers, winemakers, and NetSuite experts to close that gap. A former CFO and COO, Jeremy stays hands-on with Crafted’s development and brings a firsthand view of the financial and operational challenges beverage producers face.
