Contract winemaking presents unique administrative challenges
Posted by Josh on May 13th, 2010
An interesting statistic according to the 2009 Wine Industry Directory is that just under half (48%) of Australian wineries are listed as having their wine made offsite. This statistic is no surprise to David Cowburn of Kilchurn Wines who specialises in providing a diverse range of winemaking services for many wine companies from regions across Australia. Based in the cool climate Macedon Ranges, Kilchurn have built a large client base by offering the ability to produce handcrafted, quality wines at a fraction of the cost of establishing a winery.
This growth hasn't come without some administrative pain. With a large number of clients, and many of those with more than one batch of wine, the need to track the production process and storage of each individual wine has created significant administrative overhead. "One of the issues faced by offering such a large and diverse range of services to both large and small clients, is in the management of record keeping and finding a system that can produce a range of workable documents that bring all the historical information together.", said Louise Watts from Kilchurn's administration department.
In 2008, David made the decision to implement the VINx2 Winery Software system that, he says, "would replace the old excel, access and word documents with one program that combines them all". According to David, VINx2 has allowed Kilchurn to easily group wines owned by different clients as well as present a heads up display about the status of wines currently in production and storage. David has seen the administrative overheads reduce and the time taken to complete the billing cycle improve "The introduction of VINx2 has streamlined our paper trail from grape to bottle. We can now easily access information about any batch of wine at any stage of production. The guys at JX2 are constantly upgrading, improving and expanding the system to meet our very specific and unique needs"
David is looking forward to saving more time on administration with VINx2's new integrated contract billing module which will be on show at the WineTech Expo in Adelaide, July 5-7. "Our new billing module will simplify complex billing for contract winemaking businesses by raising charges automatically as regular and specialised winery work occurs. The administration department will then need only approve or amend the charges before generating and distributing invoices direct from VINx2" said Jamie Gilchrist, co-owner of JX2.
For further information please contact Jamie Gilchrist of JX2 Technology on +613 9015 9625 or toll free in North America on 1-888-240-4860 or visit www.winery-software.com
