Beverage invoices & inventory
One when the delivery lands, one when service ends. BeSomm reads both the way a sommelier would — vintage, format, case or bottle, net price after the discount — so your cost and your count stay current without anyone typing a thing.
The situation
Paper invoices arrive with the delivery, get initialled, and go in a stack. By the time anyone types them into a spreadsheet, the wine has already been poured.
Manual entry is the first thing to go on a busy service day, and it never gets caught up.
A few dollars a case, twice a year, across two hundred SKUs. No rep announces it and no one has time to check.
Someone walks the cellar with a clipboard after close, then types it into a spreadsheet that's already wrong by the weekend.
How it works
Your receiving staff open a saved link on their phone and take a picture. No app store, no password, no account. The link only submits — it can't see past deliveries or prices.
Dim light, faded thermal ink, a folded page on a milk crate. Every line is parsed into producer, vintage, format, quantity and net unit price, then held for a quick review.
Beverage cost updates as deliveries land, your on-hand count moves with them, and anything that changed price since last time is flagged before you approve the invoice.
Inventory
Deliveries tell BeSomm what came in. The end of service tells it what went out. Line up the bottles you sold, take one picture, and the count moves on its own — no clipboard, no walking the cellar, no spreadsheet at one in the morning.
Service close · Aug 14
Photographed at 11:42 PM · Reviewed in 20 seconds
Why generic invoice tools miss
General accounting scanners read a line of text and a total. Wine needs four things read correctly before the cost per bottle means anything at all.
The 2019 and the 2021 are different wines at different prices. Treating them as one SKU corrupts your cost the moment the vintage rolls.
Reads Mercurey 1er Cru 2019 as its own item
375 ml, 750 ml, 1.5 L and 3 L land on the same invoice line style. Cost per bottle is meaningless until the format is right.
12/750 → 12 bottles · 6/1.5L → 6 magnums
The extended price is per case, the pour cost is per bottle, and the split case has a different rate. This is where most spreadsheets quietly break.
$540.00 / case → $45.00 per bottle
Depletion allowances, post-offs and quantity breaks appear below the line, not on it. BeSomm applies them to get the price you actually paid.
Less 10% allowance → $40.50 per bottle
Price tracking
Every invoice becomes price history. When a bottle costs more than it did last time, you see it while the invoice is still open — not after the quarter closes.
Price increase · 2 lines
750 ml · Wine Distributor · Received Aug 14
Two rooms, one program
Each location keeps its own invoices, costs and price history. Nothing crosses over.
Switch between locations from the same login, or compare what each one paid for the same bottle.
Pricing is isolated per restaurant at the database level. No shared benchmarks, no data pooled with anyone else.
“I built this because I was the one standing at the back door with a phone in one hand and an invoice in the other, trying to remember what that Chablis cost in March.”
BeSomm is made by a working sommelier and wine director running the list at two restaurants in Las Vegas — not by a software company guessing at how receiving works. Every feature on this page exists because a delivery went wrong without it.
Pilot
The pilot is small and hands-on, and it's free while we build. What we want in return is your real invoices — the crumpled ones, the handwritten credits, the supplier whose format changes every quarter.
Tell us a little about your programme and we'll reply ourselves. No sales call, no drip campaign.
Add a restaurant name and a valid email so we can reply.
Questions
Nothing during the pilot. Pricing comes after, and pilot restaurants get it first and get it locked.
We add restaurants one at a time, because each new supplier format needs watching before it can be trusted. Get in touch and we'll tell you honestly where things stand and what we'd need from you.
No. Receiving staff use one saved link on their phone that only submits photos. Managers and owners sign in with a link sent to their email — there's no password to lose or share.
Every parsed invoice goes to a review screen with the photo beside it, so you can correct a line in a second. Corrections train the parser on your suppliers' formats.
It catches whole bottles reliably, because it matches labels against the wines already in your list. It won't see a bottle that broke, got comped or left as a taste, so a physical count once a month still keeps you honest — the photos just mean that count starts from a number that's close.
Photograph the bottle when it's finished, same as any other. A bottle that's open across two nights gets counted the night it empties.
Yes. Wine is the hard case — kegs, cases of twelve and cans by the sleeve are simpler once the wine logic is right.
You do. Your data is isolated per restaurant and never pooled, benchmarked or sold. Nothing is shared with suppliers.
