Choosing distillery software: a buyer's checklist for distilleries and bottlers

Buying distillery software is a ten-year decision dressed up as a subscription. The system you choose will hold records that mature as slowly as your stock — so this checklist is organised around the question that matters: will this system still be telling the truth about cask 2016/0077 in 2036?We build one of these systems, so read our conclusions with that in mind; the checklist itself is vendor-neutral and we'd stand by it even if you buy elsewhere.

First, know which buyer you are

• Scotch/UK distillery or bottler in bond: HMRC compliance (W1, W5, duty suspense), cask maturation at scale, vattings, possibly cask sales. UK-specific depth is non-negotiable.
• New-world / craft distillery: production breadth (grain to bottle), TTB or local compliance rather than HMRC, often lighter cask estates.
• Independent bottler / broker: cask trading, ownership vs custody, regauges, bottling runs from bought stock — production features matter less than stock and trading.
• Brewery/winery adding spirits: you may already own an ERP; the question becomes extend vs. add a specialist system beside it.

Everything below assumes you'll weight the checklist by which of these you are.

The capability checklist

Cask & stock records

• One record per cask with append-only history: fills, regauges (OLA and RLA), movements, owners, samples.
• Warehouse/location separate from ownership — essential if you sell casks in bond.
• Reservations: sold or on-offer casks invisible to production planning.
• Bulk (casks, tanks, IBCs) and packaged (cases, bottles) stock in one system, with pack-size-aware conversions.

Production

• The full thread: mash → fermentation → distillation → reduction → filling, with alcohol as a conserved quantity and yield vs PSY reportable.
• Vattings with per-cask inputs, measured outputs, and losses split into storage vs operational automatically.
• Batch age derived from the youngest component.

Compliance (UK buyers: weight this heavily)

• W1 and W5 generated from the stock records, per warehouse, whisky and other spirits split, every line traceable to casks and orders.
• Duty calculated at the current strength-based rates, applied at release date.
• An audit trail worthy of the name: who changed what, when, with the old value retained.

Commercial & finance

• Orders through a real lifecycle (draft → active → dispatched) with duty-paid vs in-bond handled correctly and no double counting on the W1.
• Accounting integration (Xero, Sage, Fortnox, QuickBooks…) that creates invoices from orders rather than re-keying.
• Costing to the bottle — including duty — and, if you fund distributors, A&P accrual tracking.

Platform & vendor

• Multi-site/multi-warehouse; roles and permissions; exportable data (your records, in open formats, on demand — this is your exit insurance).
• Implementation: who migrates your spreadsheet, how long, and who answers when the W1 won't balance on day 40.
• A roadmap you can influence at your size — ask for references from distilleries your size, not their largest logo.

The market, honestly mapped

Based on public information at the time of writing — verify current capabilities with each vendor directly, as products evolve.

Spirits-specialist systems. DRAMS is the long-established name in Scotch whisky stock control, used by Scotch producers and bonded warehouses, with deep bulk-stock and warehousing heritage. DISTILL x5 is a US-based distillery management system covering production, inventory and TTB reporting. Whiskey Systems Online serves US and Canadian craft distilleries with TTB-oriented compliance. Strength of the family: domain depth — these systems speak casks natively. What to probe: modernity of the interface and APIs, how returns are generated, implementation timescales, and whether the commercial/finance side matches the warehouse side.

Drinks-industry ERPs. Crafted ERP (built on Oracle NetSuite) and Bevica (built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central) bring full ERP scope — finance, purchasing, sales — with beverage layers on top; Ekos serves craft beverage producers across beer, cider and spirits. Strength: one system for the whole company, strong accounting cores. What to probe: how deep the whiskyspecifics really go — OLA/RLA history, HMRC W1 generation, in-bond cask trading, maturation losses — versus what gets handled "with configuration" (which means your budget) during implementation.

Generic ERPs adapted. NetSuite, SAP Business One, Dynamics, or inventory tools such as Unleashed (not a full ERP, by its own description), implemented with customisation. Strength: ultimate flexibility and corporate-grade finance. What to probe: every whisky-specific behaviour in the checklist above is a consulting project, and the consultants leave. This route suits groups that already run the ERP and have in-house capability; it rarely suits a 15-person distillery.

Spreadsheets. Legitimate early on; we wrote the honest comparison separately.

And Provenate. We build distillery management software specifically for Scotch whisky distilleries and bottlers: cask records with full OLA/RLA history, production from mash to bottle, vattings with HMRC-correct loss splitting, in-bond cask sales with ownership tracking, W1/W5 generated from the data, and Xero integration — the checklist above is, candidly, a description of what we think the job requires. The right way to test that claim is the same as for everyone else on this page: a scripted demo on your data.

The scripted demo: make every vendor run the same month

Brochures converge; this doesn't. Give each shortlisted vendor the same scenario — ideally anonymised rows from your own records — and watch them perform it live:

1. Fill 20 casks from a production batch; show the batch-to-cask trace.
2. Regauge one cask; show OLA, RLA, the history, and where the storage loss went.
3. Vat three casks into a tank; show the two loss types and the batch's derived age.
4. Sell one cask in bond to a broker; show reservation, ownership transfer, and that production planning can no longer pick it.
5. Release 200 cases duty-paid and ship an export order; show the duty calculation and both movements on the draft W1.
6. Generate the W1 and W5 for the month and drill one line down to cask level.
7. Change a figure, then show who changed it and what it was before.
8. Export all data for these records to CSV.

Time each step, note what required a workaround or a "that's on the roadmap", and ask the references how long implementation really took. The system that completes this script on your data, quickly, with history intact, is the right system — whoever sells it.

Red flags, any vendor

• Demos only on their polished sample data, never on yours.
• "The W1 is an export to Excel you finish by hand."
• Regauges that overwrite rather than append.
• Duty rates hard-coded rather than dated.
• No named reference customer within 3× your size.
• Data export treated as a support ticket rather than a button.