Craft Brewing Company (CBC) is a small microbrewery in Lake Elsinore, Ca. CBC is distributed throughout Riverside and Orange county but is rapidly expanding. Currently, they produce around 1,000 barrels per year and are growing production as they expand their reach. CBC runs a tasting room in the brewery, which is open 7 days/week and serves all of their production beers as well as specialty beers that are only offered in-house.
CBC came across SalesVu when looking for a more “sophisticated” POS system than the electronic cash register they were using; they read an article comparing Square to SalesVu. According to one of the CBC’s partners Tim Reagan, the cash register served them well but lacked capabilities and interfacing abilities. In addition to looking at Square, CBC also considered NCR Silver.
“We were really wanting to go to a POS that allowed us to set up a more intuitive retail system that was less confusing to train individuals on; we also wanted more accurate tracking of products,” said Reagan. “With the old style cash register we were not able to do this and what information we could get from it was very time-consuming in moving it from that device into a spreadsheet so that we could do some form of analysis on the data.”
When researching POS systems, Reagan broke down the abilities and functions of each system to compare them and see if each would perform the same operations and have similar processes as what they were already doing to avoid a difficult transition for the staff.
“All the systems have unique features that separate them from each other, but when it came down to it the SalesVu application gave us 95% of what we were looking for,” said Reagan. “With SalesVu iPad POS, we are now able to get all data regarding how certain products are doing even while the business is open real time.”
Having an iPad POS is important for Craft Brewing because they sell tastings on location, bottles to go, growlers and retail merchandise. They also do events which sometimes allow them to sell their merchandise.
“[This] is one of the reasons we were looking for a system that not only allows us to use it in our tasting room but also would give us the ability to do remote sales for events,” said Reagan. “This allows us to tie the databases for sales together and do reporting and inventory tracking much more easily.”
“We are also going to grow the [SalesVu] system as we grow our retail; at some point we will have more than one terminal in the tasting room and potentially have multiple terminals running off-site as well,” said Reagan.
For more information about Craft Brewing Company, visit their website: www.craftbrewingcompany.com, like their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter @CraftBrewingCo
