Inventory that lives in three states at once
On any given day a brewery holds raw materials (malt, hops, yeast, cans, labels and carriers), work in progress sitting in fermenters, and finished beer in bright tanks or packaged stock. Books that treat all of it as one expense line make every month wrong twice: the month you buy a pallet of malt looks terrible, the month you sell the beer it became looks like a miracle. We run batch costing so each brew carries its ingredients, packaging and a share of labour and overhead through to the day it sells.
That means valuing WIP at month end, not just counting finished cases. It also means recording losses honestly: trub and transfer losses shrink every batch, and a dumped batch should be written off as a cost the month it goes down the drain, with the volume documented, because a recorded destruction also matters to your duty position. If you already run Ekos or similar brewery software, we sync it to QuickBooks Online rather than making you keep two versions of the truth.
The keg float is a ledger, not a rounding error
Every keg that leaves on a delivery truck creates two records: a deposit you are holding, which is a liability owed back to the licensee, and a piece of your keg fleet now sitting in someone else's basement. Kegs themselves are capital equipment on an asset register, not inventory. When steel stops coming home, the books should show it: the deposit converts to income and the lost keg comes off the register, so the fleet count in the accounts matches the fleet you can actually fill.
| Balance-sheet line | Why it needs attention every month |
|---|---|
| Work in progress in fermenters | Month-end value of unfinished batches; skip it and one month overstates costs while the next understates them. |
| Keg deposit liability | Cash you hold that belongs to licensees until the kegs come back. |
| Excise and beer tax payable | Duty accrues at packaging but is remitted later, so the bank balance overstates what is yours. |
| Keg fleet | Capital equipment tracked on a register; every unreturned keg is a write-off plus deposit income. |
| Cans, labels and carriers | Bought in bulk ahead of packaging runs; expensed as used, not as purchased. |
The taproom is three businesses at one bar
Draught over your own bar, food from the kitchen and merch off the shelf earn three different margins, and mixing them into one revenue line hides which of them is working. We map the POS, whether that is TouchBistro or Square, so each category lands in its own income account with its own cost of sales. Guest taps deserve their own line too: beer you bought for resale is a different margin story from beer you brewed.
Payroll runs through the same engagement, because a brewery employs three kinds of people at once: brewers and packaging staff on wages, taproom servers with tips, and often a part-time delivery driver. End-to-End Accounting covers the bookkeeping, payroll, WSIB filings and financial reporting under one roof, priced in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
A month-end close your duty returns can stand on
Federal excise and Ontario beer tax are filed from production and packaging volumes, and reviewers from either government start by checking those volumes against your books. So the close has to reconcile physically: what left the bright tanks each month should equal what the taproom POS, the wholesale invoices and the LCBO statements say was sold or is sitting in stock. When the ledger agrees with the brewhouse log, the returns your tax filings are built on stop being a separate project.
The supporting paper flows in automatically: supplier bills from the maltster and the can supplier through Dext, payments batched through Plooto, deposits matched to POS and distributor statements. For a GTA brewery running lean, that is the difference between a close that takes days and one that is simply ready.
