Vinsight has many features to assist you in tracking your inventory levels and valuations and, more generally, in managing your accounts. If you are on one of our subscription levels that supports product costing, then you can find some useful tips and information below to ensure that your financial reporting goes smoothly. Also it outlines why if Vinsight is your master record for accounting, why you should only have current asset balances in your accounting system, not inventory items, and how you achieve this.
In this document:
Vinsight is designed as an inventory management system with comprehensive features around multi-pack sizes, multi-location, parent and child items, working with lots codes etc. Many accounting systems are not this sophisticated in the area of inventory but are designed to manage the bigger picture of Profit and Loss statements and Balance Sheets etc. With this in mind our recommendation is that you do not have your inventory items in your accounting system but instead have your inventory represented there as current asset balances only. Also see our Recommend Chart of Accounts.
The way this works is that as things happen in Vinsight that affect the inventory to increase or decrease the item balances, these get posted to the accounting system either at the time, for things like Purchase Orders, or at the end of the month as Journals, for things like Bulk Operations, Bottling, Cost of Goods Sold etc. So purchases for inventory items, the items you are purchasing have Asset Ledger Codes in Vinsight, and post to the accounting system to increase the value of those current asset accounts. Bulk Operations and Bottlings decrease the value of the Ingredients, packaging or bulk work in progress current asset accounts and increase the values of the bulk work in progress or finished items accounts depending on the type of operations. These changes are reflected using End of Period Journals.
Inventory is represented in Vinsight in 2 ways, Stock Items represent all inventory that is not in a tank or barrel, but given the Vinsight is a specialist alcohol manufacturing app, we split the bulk work in progress out and manage this a Batches in Vessels. So you will need to run 2 reports to see your full inventory, Stock On Hand for Stock Items and Bulk On Hand Cost Summary to see you work in progress in Barrel or Tank.
Before doing your ‘End of Year’ or ‘End of Period’ reporting, you should ensure that your inventory levels and valuations are up to scratch. Here are some steps you can take to ensure this is the case:
Make sure that you finalize any outstanding despatches, receipts or operations in Vinsight to ensure that inventory levels reflect all the work that you have done to date. This means despatching or receiving any sales or purchase orders that have occurred in reality but not in Vinsight. Also if you are using production features then this applies to any winery or packaging operations as well.
Use the Stock Take feature to assess and correct any dry goods variances. You can run Stock on Hand Reports either at the current time or in the past to get valuations at those times.
In order to properly utilise the many reports available to you in Vinsight, it is important to understand the basis upon which they are calculated.
‘Cost of Goods Sold’ and ‘Finished Goods Valuation’ reports run off the ‘Standard Cost’ per unit value that is manually entered against each product (in the ‘Costings’ area of each ‘Stock Item’.)
For items produced, you can base this value on the actual productions costs (see Standard Costs of Finished Items) and for items purchased, this should be based on purchase prices plus any other set margins you want to include for cost of goods reporting per unit (See Standard Costs of Purchase Items)
‘Cost Summary’ reports summarise the actual cost accumulations during the production process but do not automatically update the ‘Standard Cost’ per unit.
These Cost Summary reports are available for both Bulk Wine and Bottled Wine. (‘Bulk Wine On Hand Cost Summary’ on the Winery Workbench and ‘Bottled Wine Cost Summary’ from the Quick Reports area of the Accounts Workbench).
The “Bottled Wine Cost Summary” report groups all bottlings of the same product code together, takes the total costs divides them by the total quantity produced and therefore gives an weighted average across all bottlings of the same product. Individual bottlings are easy to view as well by looking at the individual Stock Items.
To ensure the accuracy of the ‘Cost Summary’ and ‘Valuation’ reports, it is important to ensure that the ‘Standard Cost’ used in these calculations is current and accurate. This is easy to do, as the actual costs are tracked by Vinsight as the bulk wine is processed, goes through the manufacturing process and is finally bottled to finished goods. See Standard Cost of Finished Items for detailed instructions. Once set, your finished goods inventory valuation will be based on the “Standard Cost” and your Cost Of Goods Sold journal entries will draw down this valuation until it zeros out.
A summary of all of the Quick Reports available on the Accounts Dashboard, and the basis upon which they are calculated, is set out below.
| Report Name | Report Basis |
| Cost of Goods Sold (detailed) | Standard Cost x Quantity Sold |
| Stock On Hand at Location with Total Value | Standard Cost x Quantity at Location |
| Stock on Hand Valuation | Standard Cost x Total Quantity |
| Bottling Dry Goods Movement Journals | Additive Standard Costs (at the time of packaging) x Quantity Employed |
| Bottling WIP Movement Journals | WIP Cost Summary from Bulk Ledger to Finished Item |
| Bottled Wine Cost Summary | WIP Cost Summary broken down by cost source, then totals per unit produce |
| Bulk Wine Cost Summary | WIP Cost Summary broken down by cost source, then totals per litre currently in tank or barrel |