The craft brewery industry has become a global phenomenon, with a $22 billion market in the US. Growth was strong over the last few years, and an upward trend is projected to continue.
This doesn’t mean running a craft brewery is easy. As a craft brewer yourself, you know firsthand the challenges your business faces on a day-to-day basis.
Finances are almost always a concern for craft breweries. From finding the right financing to managing cash flow, the challenges are omnipresent.
Even on a day-to-day level, you likely face challenges in this quarter. Most breweries operate gift shops, restaurants, and other cash-dominated business ventures as a way to diversify and pull in more revenue. These operations force you to manage your money at a micro-level.
Like any business, cash management poses challenges in craft breweries too. Here are some of the most common, along with tips to help solve them.
1. Cash Handling Is Always a Challenge
Perhaps the biggest cash management challenge in any business is cash handling itself. Your cashiers, servers, and even your supervisors and managers are handling cash many times per day in your brewery.
They are likely spending too much time on cash-related tasks. As a result, you may need to schedule more people, create overlap between shifts, and more to make sure your customers are getting the service they deserve.
There are ways to reduce the amount of cash handling you do. A coin and bank note recycler, for example, can help your employees spend less time counting tills and get back on the floor sooner.
2. Errors and Inaccuracies
Another challenge with cash management is the chances of an error or inaccuracy. If you have your cash supervisors or cashiers count cash manually, it’s more likely they’re going to make an error at some point.
This can eat up time as you try to determine where the error occurred and how to correct it. It can also mean lost cash and other problems. Again, technology can help. Bank note sorters and counters can provide you with more accurate results.
3. Manually Managing Floats
Floats for your cash registers may not seem like a challenge, but they can be. First, you’ll need to spend some time managing them. They’ll need to be counted and distributed. Your cashiers may need to spend time counting the tills after their shifts finish as well.
Keeping floats might also require you to have a certain amount of cash on hand. If you use a coin and bank note recycler, however, you can actually put the money you bring in right back into circulation. This allows you to reduce the amount of cash you need to keep on hand and the amount of time you spend on managing floats.
4. Dividing up Tips
If you have a restaurant or bar in your brewery, you’re familiar with tip management for your employees. Tips can certainly be a cash management challenge for craft breweries. First, you may need to devise a policy to help you divide tips between your employees.
Next, you’ll actually have to manage those tips. At the end of the day, you need to have kept track of the amount tipped and to whom the cash belongs. Whether you use a communal pool or track tips per employee, you still have to get the right amounts. A coin and bank note recycler can automate this process and eliminate this challenge altogether.
5. Ensuring You Have the Right Processes
Cash management comes down to having the right procedures in place. If you don’t have the right policies, you won’t be able to manage cash nearly as efficiently in your business.
The right technology can help, and the right processes work hand in hand with this equipment to help you overcome these common cash management challenges in your business.
