Active Club Forum: Streamline Regulatory Compliance for Wine

Streamlining Regulatory Compliance in the Wine Industry:

Wineries are struggling with regulatory compliance. Understanding the rules and respective reports that vary by State and the options that are available to support a winery are like comparing apples to oranges. There are several options and reviewing at least three of them, some of the options work together and other solutions only work with their own proprietary software.

First, it needs to be mentioned that a winery is only required to support the States in which they sell their wine. Many wineries choose to start with their own State and slowly add new States as the demand becomes profitable. No one has to tackle compliance for all fifty States unless they choose to do so.

There are several companies who support compliance but before launching into who tracks and prepares the compliance reports the wineries need to understand the type of information that needs to be tracked. Compliance is not as simple as outsourcing a job to a person or a tool for processing. Wineries need tracking specific on individual sales transactions.

Active Club Management works with several compliance companies. Combining feedback from all companies has helped us to developed several reports for compliance that can be sent to the compliance consultants. These reports include over 20 unique pieces of information on each respective sale. The required details will depend on the compliance company’s preference. A partial list of the details include destination, birth date, shipping tracking number, volume of each individual bottle of wine, type of container, etc.

Two major issues are faced by compliance companies.

1) LATE REPORTS: Wineries don’t provide information on time. Compliance companies spend time contacting wineries to collect the necessary information for filing.

2) MISSING INFORMATION: at the compliance companies are spending a tremendous amount of time reviewing the information from the wineries only to find that information is often missing from the reports. Compliance representatives then spend time hunting down the missing details. This is labor intensive and delays results in delayed filing dates.

SOLUTION: In order to prevent delays Active Club Management provides two NEW features to streamline compliance reporting. We can compile sales for all channels of the winery and provide the following compliance support. If you have a solution in place, please check to see if your system offers the following features. If they do, it could save you a significant amount of time.

*** PREPARATION AUDIT: Prior to the first of the month Active Club Management will review the data that is required for the compliance reports. In the review Active Club Management will search for and identify any information that is missing. The winery will automatically be notified of the results, missing information (if any) and the opportunity to update their records before the end of the month.

*** AUTO-DELIVERY OF COMPLIANCE REPORTS: Wineries are able to have the compliance reports scheduled to automatically be complied and automatically sent to their internal and/or external compliance support managers.

Compliance Paperwork: Wineries can choose to track and prepare the compliance reports themselves or send the required sales information to a secondary source and outsource the reporting

Comparing Regulatory Compliance Options and Prices:
1) If you sign on with a company and decide to change, can you export all your data?
2) Do you have to sign a term contract or can you get their service month-to-month. This way, you can make sure their services and prices fit the business needs of the winery.
3) Proprietary Information: Sales revenues and customer information is shared in the compliance reports. Any company with which a winery shares this information must understand how the information will be stored, secured and used. This needs to be in writing and signed by both parties.
4) How long is the proprietary information stored on the compliance company’s server?
5) Will the compliance company use the winery’s information to target their own sales efforts of their own internal sales team?
6) Will the compliance company share the information with anyone, internally or externally?
7) How is the information secured?
8) Is the information backed-up?
9) What are the real costs? Purchase cost, after annual fees, support fees, upgrade, fees, etc.
10) How much are their services marked up to cover the "free" compliance?
11) How current are the reports, tax rates and jurisdiction codes and calculations?
12) How will the rules stay up to date on dynamic compliance law and rules?
13) Will the service provide complete compliance reporting for a winery who ships through other channels?
14) Do they offer permits, renewals, and all the other components of compliance?
15) Do they offer ship limits compliance checking?
16) Do they offer compliance support and consulting?
17) Does the solution integrate with solutions from multiple companies for accounting, POS, Shopping cart and club solutions?

This provides a partial list of questions and concerns when wineries look for compliance support. The bottom line is that there are several solutions on the market that streamline the management of compliance. They are not all the same and shopping for the best service can make a significant impact.

I would question all providers ( especially those offering solutions for free or low cost) with security issues and use of proprietary information.

More to come….

Theresa Dorr
Active Club Management

www.activeclubmanagement.com
www.acmwineclubsoftware.com
www.wineclubsoftware.net

Edited by Theresa (Mon Sep 17 2007 05:10 PM)

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