FLASH - Anomaly Vineyards, written as a "winery to watch" in 12/02 Wine Enthusiast, chose Winery Pro - Details in 3/03 Newsletter

About This Newsletter

Last month, we introduced you to the basic features of Winery Pro™, the innovative new software product designed to assist wineries in leveraging their customer relationships and growing them into higher sales.

Now that we've shown you the big picture, we will focus on individual task areas that are essential to the way winery operators do business. Topics like Wine Club management, mining your Winery Pro™ database information for customer buying preferences, using targeted e-mail to communicate with groups small and large, or our developing POS strategy, to name a few.

Spotlight: GlenLyon Winery

It would be hard to find a better first Featured Winery Pro™ Client than Squire Fridell, owner of GlenLyon Vineyards & Winery in Kenwood, CA. GlenLyon's specialty is Estate Grown Syrah, bottling approximately 500 cases per year. Squire sells the GlenLyon wines by direct sales working with the Wine Room in Kenwood and from his winery using Winery Pro™. Everyone reading this newsletter has seen Squire up close and personal - he was "Ronald McDonald" on our television screens and also performs thousands of voice over commercial roles for companies like Toyota.

When we met Squire he was tracking wine sales using a variety of back office tools including a flat file database and spreadsheet. Squire has sheared hours off his wine sales, and marketing process using Winery Pro™ and has given us other great ideas about helping smaller wineries. He coined the phrase "At a Glance" when referring to our product and has been enthusiastically helping to spread the word about the Winery Pro™. TCA thanks Squire for his tremendous support of our company and we are excited about helping GlenLyon grow its customer base and achieve maximum wine sales going forward.

Winery Pro™ Features Re-Cap

Here's a recap of the key sales and administrative features of Winery Pro™:

• At a Glance - Customer Sales, Invoice History, Last Purchase and Sales Rank
• Computer(s) as ultra-smart cash register(s)
• Batch invoicing of Wine Club shipments or any group you define
• Full Wine Club membership reporting and evaluation
• Complete management of Futures sales and delivery
• Credit card charges processed from Winery Pro™
• Multi-level pricing, quantity and Wine Club discounting applied automatically
• Immediate inventory On Hand Amounts as you sell

Coming Next Month

• Batch Invoice Processing - Wine Clubs or other groups
  
  
• Profile of Winery Pro™ User - Steve and Linda Goldfarb, Anomaly Vineyards, Napa CA

Selling Futures with Winery Pro™

This month we focus on managing wine sold on Futures. Futures are a great way to build cash flow and customer loyalty, but are often prone to errors in record keeping that can cost you time (looking for delivery information) and money (when you can't find the delivery information and wind up giving you customer an extra case of wine)! Selling and tracking those Futures with our system is easy - literally a button click. As each Invoice is created, you have a handy option to click a Futures checkbox for each Invoice item. All wines with the checkbox clicked are sent to an Open Futures report that you can view or print, choosing any combination of several report parameters.

When the Future is delivered at a later date, you can rapidly locate the invoice and record updated shipping or delivery information about the item. This process removes the Future as an Open item and sends it to a Delivered Futures report, showing the delivery detail and applicable sales tax for that transaction.

So, using Winery Pro™ to administer Futures allows you to quickly track what you have sold, where it has been sold from, and easily store and retrieve any additional delivery details. Don't put off those valuable Futures sales any longer - following this simple approach, you can't go wrong!

When delivery questions arise, simply call up the Invoice and check the delivery information. Since you are able to find the information quickly and deliver it confidently, your customer will be convinced and impressed at how organized you are.

Some other ideas for managing Futures with Winery Pro™:


• If you wish to sell Futures to a specific target number of cases, establish a separate inventory item, or even better a location, and allocate cases to it. Winery Pro™ shows real-time inventory on every Invoice as you sell. It also allows you to sell negative inventory (when the winemaker or manager says "go ahead and sell them anyway"), but when you hit 0 or less you know it's time to wind things up.


• When it's time to release a particular wine sold on Futures for pickup, or sell more Futures, you can quickly e-mail and/or mail merge letters to notify groups of past or current Futures customers about pickup instructions.


• The status of Open and Delivered Futures can easily be seen in their respective reports so that you don't oversell your (committed to Futures) inventory.

Winery Pro™ Training - Get up to Speed Quickly!

Software training takes many forms and the staff at TCA has strong feelings about providing an excellent training experience for our users.
Richard Ross, the lead developer of Winery Pro™, also serves as Adjunct Faculty for Santa Rosa Junior College teaching FileMaker Pro and Excel. Taylor Poff our, Winery Pro™ Product Manager, worked as Classroom Instructor on MS Office Products and other programs at New Horizons Computer Learning Center and performed numerous user training sessions at Mills College. Teddie Pierce has an extensive background in accounting software support and training since 1988 with Great Plains Accounting and Dynamics, QuickBooks, Cougar Mountain Accounting, MAS90 and TimeSlips.

Our software training is different from other models you might experience in the computing world today.
We believe in training you can sink your teeth into! You and your staff will not only learn features of Winery Pro™, revving you up to high speed using the software, but you also will learn how easy it is to leverage the powerful functions of the FileMaker Pro database (that Winery Pro™ is built on) into increased customer interest and sales. We also cover database basics, data integrity, and internal accounting controls for your winery.

Taking your Winery Pro™ training in a group environment helps to solidify your knowledge, and you can get great ideas from other users about how they will be using the software.

Students from our Advanced FileMaker User Sessions were asked the following question:
"Would you recommend the training to other people using FileMaker Pro?"

"Absolutely! Perhaps as valuable to me as the "training" was the opportunity to hear from current users. I would absolutely recommend this training to other users."

- - - Jim Spahr, Spahr Insurance Services, Petaluma CA

"TC Alliance training is top notch. The group interaction and roundtable discussion really sparked my interest in FileMaker Pro and how PFT could benefit from it. They answered my questions effectively and gave me the tools necessary ... I would definitely attend more classes!"

- - - Kimberley Searles, Office / Information Systems Administrator, The Pacific Forest Trust, Santa Rosa CA

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Phone: (707) 544-1559 | Fax: (707) 544-5090
E-mail: support@tcalliance.com