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Inventory and Traceability

ochiburi

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Hi Brad,

I used Beersmith for a long time as my home brew solution and now I use it for my micro brewery business. I really like the product!

I would welcome better inventory support, in particular for ingredient traceability: For legal reasons I need to record which batches of ingredients are used in which brew. In terms of features this means: the ability to add items to the inventory with separate batch numbers for each batch of each ingredient I buy (with the cost and volume per batch, plus the vendor/manufacturer name). When doing a brew day it also means the ability to record which batch of ingredients are used in each brew. Having a report that shows the batch number of each ingredient used in each brew would also be useful to me. At present I record this all on paper.

Of course in UK and all of Europe, this is a legal requirement for those who sell their products in both large and small scale. It may not be much use to a homebrewer, but it sure would help those of us who brew professionally.

 
I would also like to have this feature!

A dirty workaround I use is to clone each ingredient on day I obtain it. So for instance, if I buy new US-05 yeast, I'll make a clone from the "default" US-05 and modify the name with expiration date or some other stuff needed and edit the values for item. So I can then trace each ingredient used in each batch. I do it for all ingredients.

I know that it doesn't cover 100% of your case, but could help until the feature will be in ;)
 
ochiburi said:
I would welcome better inventory support, in particular for ingredient traceability: For legal reasons I need to record which batches of ingredients are used in which brew. In terms of features this means: the ability to add items to the inventory with separate batch numbers for each batch of each ingredient I buy (with the cost and volume per batch, plus the vendor/manufacturer name).
Lot traceability isn't done easily, but there are additional fields for each ingredient category that can be repurposed for this. The kind of data management needed to sort and apply lots to various items is a lot more than should expected for an application this cheap. Just an opinion, but your legal requirements may be bigger than could be reasonably expected in BeerSmith's homebrewer focus.

I'll just add the caution that BeerSmith indexes by the item name, so that field has to be unique in order to pull the appropriate information into the recipe. The other fields sort, but they don't seem to index. You'll also need to update each recipe log with the correct lots, which is time consuming.

Obviously, one fix is just some extra fields that can be reported and sorted, but that would require programming additional indexing for these fields in order for BeerSmith to see them as unique, which isn't an easy task. Perhaps it's time that Brad look into developing a probrewer focused version of BeerSmith! Until that day, here's some possible workarounds.

Malt: Use the Origin field. I use it to record the manufacturer. Simply duplicate the item and add the lot number after the manufacturer.

Hops: The Type field could be used because the concept of "bittering" vs "Aroma" types is obsolete.

Yeast: the Product ID field is ideal for this.

Misc: There really isn't a perfectplace for lot numbers. The Use For field is closest.

When doing a brew day it also means the ability to record which batch of ingredients are used in each brew. Having a report that shows the batch number of each ingredient used in each brew would also be useful to me. At present I record this all on paper.

Good! There should always be a paper record of the actual items used for the brew day.  :D

Of course in UK and all of Europe, this is a legal requirement for those who sell their products in both large and small scale. It may not be much use to a homebrewer, but it sure would help those of us who brew professionally.

Although I still use BeerSmith for recipe design and brew logs, I've had to start using another application to do more comprehensive lot tracking. There seem to be more and more applications available each year. Initially, the cost seemed high, but I can now see a savings in efficiency since it handles the whole supply and sales chains and is cloud based. It has consolidated many spreadsheets and other stand alone software and saved me hours every week.
 
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