In many drinks businesses, the challenges are predictable: the pressures of delivering a streamlined, robust sales sample process, packaging rules that keep changing, quality checks that matter more than ever, and finance teams trying to keep up without slowing the business down. Too often, these gaps are filled with spreadsheets, manual checks or side systems that “work for now”. The question is no longer whether these processes need support; it’s whether your ERP is actually designed to handle them.
That gap between what the business needs and what the ERP can realistically support is where the issues start. Over time, workarounds become standard procedure and critical processes drift outside the system of record. Here at TVT, this is something we see repeatedly when working with drinks brands and distributors.
The latest updates to Bevica, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, have been designed to close that gap by bringing these everyday operational realities back into the ERP, without forcing teams into rigid processes.
Sample orders without the workarounds
Sample orders are a familiar pain point for wine and drinks distributors. Commercial teams need to move quickly, while finance teams still need consistent treatment, traceability and reporting. In many organisations, that gap is bridged with ad‑hoc zero‑priced orders, manual posting groups or external trackers.
This latest Bevica update includes a formalised sample process: a dedicated sample price type that allows users to choose either a true zero price or a 100% discount. Both result in the same net value, but the difference in line presentation matters, particularly for reporting, audit trails and how documents appear to customers.
This is combined with sales document configuration that automatically applies your financial settings and defaults to your preferred samples item unit. For a wine merchant, that means a 75cl bottle rather than a case when sending a tasting sample while a gin producer would send out a 70cl sample bottle. Finance teams are benefitting from consistent posting, making it far easier to them to analyse sample spend by brand, salesperson or customer segment, all without hunting through exceptions.
Turning EPR packaging into structured data, not spreadsheets
For many drinks businesses, packaging compliance sits just outside the ERP. It is managed through spreadsheets, workarounds and manual checks.
Packaging compliance is another area where many businesses rely on offline calculations. EPR introduces weight-based costs and reporting that is difficult to manage accurately outside the system of record.
Using Business Central’s Sustainability module as the framework, Bevica allows users to define material compositions, such as glass bottles and cardboard packaging, with weights, units and fees. The system then calculates EPR weight and expected cost per unit on the item card and aggregates this through sales transactions.
An excise journal collects posted transactions, capturing packaging weight, fees, emissions and customer details. While this data does not yet post directly to the general ledger, it gives finance and operations teams a reliable, auditable dataset for compliance returns. TVT is extending this with distribution cost tooling to streamline postings as regulations continue to evolve.
Quality, warehouse control and Shopify integration
Business Central’s latest Quality Management module now offers Bevica users a more structured control over inspections at receipt or within warehouse locations. This is an area that, till now, has often been handled informally or inconsistently.
Users can define quality tests and inspection templates covering packaging condition, pallet type, sensory checks or numeric ranges. These inspections can trigger automatically based on receipt or movement events, or be created manually when exceptions arise.
Bevica users in the warehouse will be able to capture results on handheld devices or tablets, including photos. Inspection reports and certificates will then be generated and stored for internal review or customer use and held against the quality inspection, lot, serial number. This improvement provides evidence and traceability without additional systems.
On the e-commerce side, Microsoft is continuing to enhance the Shopify–Business Central integration. Multi‑currency orders, improved attribute mapping and variant handling support better control of online sales. TVT is extending this further for Bevica users, improving refund handling, duty‑free flows and point‑of‑sale integration based on feedback from live customer implementations.
Interested in seeing Bevica updates in action?
If you are looking for a more structured way to manage compliance, finance and operational processes in your drinks business, get in touch with TVT to find out how Bevica could support your next stage of growth.
