Case Study: Roland Wines
Industry: Winery
- Company: Roland Wines
- Situation: A start-up winery added a tasting room and restaurant along with increasing wine production for both retail and wholesale markets.
- Role: Lead consultant
- Analysis: A profitability analysis was conducted to determine the actual cash contribution of each part of the business.
- Findings: The financial system include a basic version of QuickBooks and the Square Point-of-Sale system with no integration between the two. The founder was only able to see the total bottom-line results each month but had no visibility into what was causing fluctuations or losses.
- Solution and Result: The detailed profitability analysis divided the business into several categories (wine sales, food sales, event rentals, merchandise and other) to determine the relative gross profit of each. The analysis showed that the sales of premium wines was the largest gross profit contributor. While sales of lower shelf wines, food and rentals were profitable, they couldn’t provide enough cash to cover the indirect expenses of the company. The analysis changed the founder’s grape buying plan to increase production of premium wines and make sure they never ran low. The analysis also showed the opportunity to lower food prices and increase traffic, resulting in the sale of more premium wine. The Square POS data was synchronized with QuickBooks to provide consistent visibility to sales in each category.
