Nearly nine hours a week of admin, handed to software the brewery already paid for

Goldmark has brewed cask beer in Poling, near Arundel, since 2013. Draft Pick, a keg brand, is brewed alongside it. The team is small: Ethan runs the brewery, Marta runs customer engagement, and I run the business side.

Breww and Xero were both paid for. Neither was doing the job. On Monday 28 September, Breww held a floor plan and a brew kit and nothing else, and Xero had never raised an invoice. Every order, dispatch note and invoice still came out of ViewPlan, an old desktop system on one PC at the brewery.

So the work happened around the software instead of inside it. Invoices were raised in one system and keyed into another, emailed by hand, and never followed by a reminder or a statement. Supplier bills were typed into Xero. Casks went out to pubs and were tracked on paper and memory. Marta built her call lists from spreadsheets. Every call to the brewery went to one mobile.

None of that is unusual. It is what a small business looks like when the software has been bought but never implemented.

Breww is now the system of record, and everything else hangs off it.

• Off ViewPlan. Customers, products, price books and casks exported, cleansed and loaded into Breww. ViewPlan no longer invoices or dispatches.
• Breww to Xero. Invoices, credit notes and supplier bills arrive in Xero as drafts, and payments sync in both directions. The invoices still open in ViewPlan were brought across and the balances checked to match.
• Invoices and payment. Invoice emails go automatically once an order is delivered, from a verified accounts address. Payment reminders are on, and monthly statements start in November.
• Supplier bills. A bill emailed to the accounts inbox becomes a draft bill in Xero.
• Casks. Every cask is a tracked record, and the pubs holding them sit on a monthly uplift list.
• Sales. Five lists in Breww create Marta's tasks each week: overdue payments to chase, casks to collect, customers with missing details, regulars due to order, and lapsed customers to win back.
• Phones and inbox. An unanswered call goes to voicemail and raises an alert in Teams. A daily sweep checks junk folders for customer emails, and caught a trade order on its first day.
• Bookkeeping in one place. A short stretch of bookkeeping kept in FreeAgent was cleared into Xero, and FreeAgent is now switched off.
• Trade marketing. Customers marked for marketing in Breww sync to Klaviyo. It does one job today, and it is the base the brewery's marketing will grow from.
• Where to drink. The map of pubs pouring Goldmark and Draft Pick on the brewery's website now updates itself overnight from Breww. Tag a pub in Breww and, once it has had a delivery in the last four weeks, it appears. A rosette shows how often it pours the beer: gold for a permanent line, silver for a delivery every fortnight, bronze otherwise. Each beer's page shows where it was recently sent. The website only reads from Breww, never stores a contact name, phone number or order detail, and a pub that asks not to be listed stays off whatever Breww says.
• Duty. October's alcohol duty is set up in Breww.
• Process. Seven SOPs rewritten around Breww and Xero, replacing a quality system written around ViewPlan.

Breww's own onboarding checklist was 85% complete at go-live.

Breww publishes a sound onboarding checklist and more than 350 help guides, and I followed the checklist. What made the difference was not knowing something the guides leave out. It was the order, and the checking.

Get the ledger agreeing first. The invoices still open in ViewPlan went into Xero, and the balances were checked to match, before the new system was trusted with anything. If the books do not agree on day one, they never quite agree again.

Prove each automation end to end. An invoice raised, emailed and sitting in Xero is proof. A setting switched on is not. The first three live orders went through the whole chain before I called the integration done.

Log every configuration mistake. I kept a running log of every setting that turned out to be wrong, and fixed them before the team relied on them. The few still open are being closed out. That log is the part a first-timer does not keep, and it is where most of the cost of doing it yourself hides.

Rewrite the process with the software. The SOPs changed in the same week. New software with procedures that still describe the old way puts a team back on the old way within a month.

An order goes into Breww. When it is delivered, Breww raises the invoice, emails it to the customer and puts it in Xero. When the customer pays, both systems know. If they do not, the reminder goes without anyone writing it, and the order appears on Marta's overdue list.

Marta starts the week from her Breww lists rather than a spreadsheet. Ethan works from the SOPs. Supplier bills land in Xero as drafts for checking, not typing. When a delivery is marked complete in Breww, the pub's place on the website's Where to drink map is updated that night, without anyone opening the website.

The accountant still approves what goes into the books. Nothing here took a decision away from a person. It took away the typing that sat in front of the decision.