Running a production brewery is hard work. Not only are there some heavy taxes and laws, but your brewing process is very time sensitive, your margins are too tight, and you have a lot of competition.
Plus, there’s that ongoing problem of keg management.
Episode four of the SWK Tech Time Podcast addresses this last point in detail, and discusses some of the solutions that craft brewers can use to stop money from literally walking out your door (as people leave with your kegs).
Listen to the podcast here to learn more.
Don’t have time to listen to the podcast now? We’ve reprinted this article to give you an introduction into what KegMaster does for production breweries.
To get the actual numbers about how much your brewery is losing each year, listen to the podcast on your commute home.
Reprinted article is below.*
BeerRun Brewery Management Software is now offering a great add-on for craft brewers of all sizes: KegMaster. Available as either an add-on module or stand-alone app, it alerts you to the status of your kegs and helps you get your missing kegs back into your brewery.
Empty kegs end up in all sorts of places: half buried in sand and scrub at the beach, conveniently placed as a seat next to a campsite in the middle of a gorgeous canyon, even clogging up the storage rooms in apartments. Sometimes, as you can see above, they end up in tiger enclosures at the zoo. It’s a fact of life that the people who take off with your kegs don’t really care about them, and that craft brewers lose kegs all the time.
However, losing kegs doesn’t have to be a fact of your life.
With KegMaster, you’ll have the ability to locate your missing kegs immediately and get them back. Here’s how.
First off: What’s BeerRun?
BeerRun is a brewery management system. In essence, it’s a computer software program that makes it easy for you to run your brewery operations and financials, freeing up your time to focus on making great beer. BeerRun was created so craft brewers can manage their businesses more efficiently and automate their TTB reports. The BeerRun team is as picky as their customers, and we know that product quality is the key to success. That’s why BeerRun manages the entire brewing process from end to end, so our clients can stop wasting time on manual processes, and devote their efforts to making great beer!
One important part of brewing awesome beer is managing keg inventory, so we created KegMaster.
How does KegMaster track my kegs?
KegMaster is an easy-to-use keg management tool that shows you the status and location of all your kegs in real-time. It’s color-coded, as follows:
- Kegs listed in green are on-site.
- Kegs listed in amber are off-site. If they are supposed to be gone right now, they don’t require any action from you.
- Kegs listed in red are overdue for return and need to be tracked down.
How do I track down a keg with KegMaster?
Sometimes, restaurants or bars have your kegs. Since you want to maintain your business relationships with them, you don’t want to go on the warpath to recover them. KegMaster offers a great alternative:
Set up a customized and polite wait time.
KegMaster allows you to customize the wait time before sending out a reminder to the company that has your keg. For example, you could set a wait time of 30 days, and on day 31, the KegMaster system will auto-generate an email and send it to that customer. This email automatically includes a PDF of all the overdue kegs that the customer has, so that they know exactly which ones are yours–and whether you’ll be withholding their keg deposits.
How can I be sure they’ve returned my keg?
When your keg is returned, you simply scan its barcode (or manually enter the keg number). Once the keg’s ID number is entered, KegMaster automatically updates the status of your keg to green, auto-generates a received voucher, and even generates a credit memo.
Suspicious about a specific keg or a specific distributor? When you want to know about companies who repeatedly keep your kegs longer than they should, KegMaster’s easy reporting system allows you to drill down to view each keg or company in detail. With KegMaster, you are always informed and can plan accurately when that company places future orders.
Listen to the podcast to learn more about KegMaster.
Photo licensed for use by Rob Shenk
*This article was previously published on the Beer Run website on April 4, 2014.