Still Typing Invoices Into Your POS?
A delivery arrives. Cases are stacked by the door. Customers are waiting at the register.
And somewhere in that stack of paperwork is an invoice that still needs to become accurate inventory in your POS.
For many liquor stores, that still means manually entering products, quantities, case costs, discounts, and other information line by line.
Liquor Bee gives you a better way.
Our preferred method is simple: automate as much of the process as possible. If invoice or order information is available digitally and we can pull it, we want to eliminate the need for your team to upload or type it in at all.
But we also understand how liquor stores actually operate.
Not every vendor has an online portal or sophisticated ordering system. You might call a small local vendor, place an order over the phone, and receive a handwritten or printed receipt when the delivery shows up.
That's why Liquor Bee doesn't give you just one way to receive inventory.
We give you five.
1. Scan Product Barcodes
If your invoice includes product barcodes, you can scan them directly into the receiving process.
This is especially helpful when a delivery includes products your store has never carried before.
Instead of creating every new item from scratch, Liquor Bee can use its product dictionary to prepopulate available product information. Your team can focus on entering and verifying the quantity and price rather than manually building the entire product.
Less data entry. Faster receiving. Fewer opportunities for mistakes.
2. Take a Picture With Your Phone
Have a standard paper invoice?
Take a picture with your iPhone or Android device and upload it to Liquor Bee.
Liquor Bee's Invoice Scan reads the uploaded invoice and helps turn it into a staged purchase order for your team to review.
For the best results, capture the entire page, make sure the text is readable, and avoid cutting off quantities, products, or prices.
Once processing is complete, your team can review the information Liquor Bee extracted and make any necessary corrections before receiving the order into inventory.
You stay in control of the final numbers without having to type the entire invoice yourself.
3. Digitize Long Invoices With a Brother Scanner
Not every distributor sends you a nice, single-page invoice.
Long invoices—like those you may receive from Southern Glazer's—can be awkward to photograph clearly with a phone.
That's where a document scanner can help.
Feed the invoice through your Brother scanner to create a digital copy, then upload it into Liquor Bee for processing.
This gives your team an easy way to digitize longer invoices without trying to line up multiple phone pictures or manually enter every line.
Once uploaded, Liquor Bee can process the document and help turn it into a staged purchase order for review.
4. Prefer the Old-School Way? Manually Create a PO
Technology should give you more options—not take them away.
If you prefer the old-school approach, you can still manually create a purchase order in Liquor Bee.
Add your products, enter your quantities and costs, and build the PO yourself just like you normally would.
Not every invoice needs automation, and not every employee wants to change the way they've been receiving inventory for years.
That's okay.
The manual option is still there whenever you need it.
5. Our Preferred Method: Don't Touch the Invoice at All
The best invoice to enter is the one you never have to enter.
Whenever a distributor makes invoice or order information available digitally,
Liquor Bee's preferred approach is to automate the process.
If we can pull it digitally, we will.
That means there may be nothing for your team to photograph, scan, upload, or manually type. Liquor Bee can use the available digital information to help prepare the order for your receiving workflow.
For your staff, that's the ideal experience.
The delivery arrives, the information is already available, and your team can focus on verifying what actually showed up rather than recreating an invoice that's already digital somewhere else.
But Not Every Vendor Is Digital
We also understand the reality of running a liquor store.
You may work with a small local wine supplier, craft producer, specialty distributor, or other vendor that doesn't have an online ordering system.
Maybe you call them on the phone.
They write down the order.
A driver shows up a few days later.
And they hand you a paper receipt.
There's no website for us to connect to. No online portal. No digital invoice. No email copy. No API.
That's exactly why Liquor Bee supports all five methods.
If we can automate it, we automate it.
If we can digitize it, we digitize it.
And if all you have is a piece of paper, we can work with that too.
Review Before You Receive
No matter how the purchase order gets into Liquor Bee, your team stays in control before inventory is updated.
Once the order is staged, your team has an opportunity to review the important details before anything is received.
Start by verifying units per case, number of cases, and individual units.
That matters.
A six-bottle case and a twelve-bottle case need to be represented correctly, even when the product itself looks familiar.
Next, review your costs.
Liquor Bee's updated staged-order workflow allows your team to adjust:
Case Cost
Unit Cost
Discount Per Case
Change the case cost and Liquor Bee can update the corresponding unit cost, giving your team a convenient place to reconcile invoice pricing and discounts before receiving the delivery.
Automation helps get the information in front of you faster.
Your team still makes the final call.
Need to Double-Check Something? Pull Up the Original Invoice.
Your team can also download the original uploaded invoice image from the invoice queue.
If a product description doesn't look right, a quantity needs another look, or you want to verify a price, you can compare the staged information against the original document.
That keeps the source document close to the receiving workflow instead of forcing someone to go find the original invoice in a stack of paperwork.
Five Ways In. One Receiving Workflow.
Every distributor is different.
Every delivery is different.
And every liquor store has vendors at different levels of technology.
That's why Liquor Bee doesn't require every invoice to arrive the same way.
You can:
Scan product barcodes from an invoice.
Snap a picture with your iPhone or Android.
Scan a long document using a Brother scanner.
Manually create a purchase order when you prefer the traditional approach.
Automate it entirely when the invoice or order information is available digitally.
However the information gets there, the goal is the same:
Turn the delivery into a staged order, verify the important details, and receive accurate inventory without spending your afternoon typing invoices into your POS.
Our preference will always be to automate as much as we can.
But your vendors don't have to change the way they do business just so your POS can keep up.
Bring one of your distributor invoices to a Liquor Bee demo. Whether it's already digital, a traditional distributor invoice, a picture from your phone, or a paper receipt from a local vendor, we'll walk through how Liquor Bee can handle the receiving workflow with you.
Comments