Time is a small business owner’s most valuable resource — and it’s in increasingly short supply as your liquor store grows.
As customers, employees, and administrative duties demand more and more of your time, it’s easy to let things slip through the cracks. Bestselling bottles often stay out of stock for days, mistakes on purchase orders result in sky-high inventory costs, and vendors make errors that go unnoticed and unchecked.
After a while, your liquor store’s success turns into an unmanageable nightmare.
Fortunately, there’s a way to protect your valuable time and prevent these costly mistakes: liquor store inventory automation.
In this blog, we’ll explore three automations and how to put them to work for your business.
It’s a staple in every liquor store owner’s office: the shoebox or filing cabinet stuffed with invoices and receipts from suppliers.
Without a proper filing system, you’ll struggle to review your historical vendor records, track inventory spending, or ensure accurate fulfillment of your orders.
Let’s say your supplier delivered 12 cases of Tito’s vodka this week, but last week, you only received 10. To make sure you actually ordered and received the proper quantities, you’d need to find and compare your invoices — an impossible task without organized paperwork.
Things can get even worse if you have an unexpected liquor store audit, since officials often ask for invoices to make sure you’ve paid taxes and only purchased inventory from licensed wholesalers.
Enter: AI-powered invoice scanning. This powerful feature allows you to digitize your paper invoices without spending hours per week on manual data entry, ensuring you can review invoices effortlessly.
Related Read: How To Pass a Liquor Store Audit Without Breaking a Sweat
AI-powered invoicing is simple.
When you receive an invoice, you take a photo of it, then feed it into optical character recognition (OCR) technology. From there, your point of sale (POS) software feeds the invoice data into your inventory records. This includes the quantity received, price, invoice date, and more.
That’s it! You’ll have digitized records and up-to-date inventory data — making it easy to spot discrepancies and ensure you received exactly what you paid for.
It’s a busy afternoon. You notice that you’re running low on Jose Cuervo Especial, but forget to place an order with your supplier.
By the time Friday rolls around, you’ve only got one bottle left — not nearly enough to last through the weekend rush.
If this scenario sounds familiar, you need to automate your liquor store’s purchase order (PO) creation process. This eliminates the manual hassle of creating POs, taking a critical item off your long to-do list.
Automated POs protect your bottom line by preventing stockouts, all while saving you valuable time.
First, set minimum order thresholds for your most popular bottles. For example, you might replenish Jack Daniels No. 7 once your on-hand inventory drops below 12.
When your POS system detects that you’ve dropped below this threshold, it automatically generates a PO to replace the low-stock bottle. Make sure to set a maximum order quantity to keep your inventory spending under control.
This powerful feature saves you a step and ensures you never run out of your customers’ favorite spirits.
Liquor store owners often rely on their intuition when it comes to stocking their shelves. They think they know which spirits and sizes are most popular — but are sometimes surprised when they run out of an unexpected SKU or a promising bottle gathers dust.
Want to take the guesswork out of curating your store’s selection? Rely on the data instead.
Your POS system constantly collects information about your customers’ shopping habits and product preferences. This data helps you understand and predict their behavior, but it’s not always easy to interpret.
That’s where auto ranking comes in. This powerful feature uses AI to analyze your sales data and help you identify your most profitable bottles — and which ones you should discontinue.
Auto ranking analyzes your store’s historical sales data and assigns each of your bottles an A through D grade. This grade accounts for several key performance indicators (KPIs), like profit margin, inventory turnover, and more.
You can count on your A-ranked bottles to sell consistently and generate high profits. You should stock more of these and display them prominently on your shelves.
Your D-ranked bottles often have lower margins or are less popular among your customers. They might not be worth the shelf space, so consider including them in mix and match or bundle promotions to increase turnover and free up cash.
Free Resource: Product Mix Optimization for Liquor Stores: Balancing Premium and Budget Options
We’ve covered how these automations can save you time and money — now, let’s talk next steps.
If you want access to these powerful tools, you need to upgrade to a POS solution designed for liquor store inventory automation. Along with invoice scanning, automated POs, and auto ranking, you need features like:
Bottle POS checks all these boxes and more. Check out how Eddie Holguin, a Texas package store owner, uses our software to lighten his workload and manage vast amounts of inventory.
See Bottle POS’ inventory automation features in action by scheduling a live, personalized demo with one of our liquor industry experts today.
Bottle POS was designed to be smart and simple. Instead of having hundreds of features that liquor store owners won't use, we concentrate on the features that really make a difference.
%20-%20BLOG.webp?width=370&height=250&name=BPOS%20-%20Switching%20Liquor%20POS%20Systems%20-%20What%20To%20Expect%20(and%20What%20To%20Avoid)%20-%20BLOG.webp)
