Winery, brewery and distillery software in Australia: WET, excise, clubs and container deposits

Which systems does a drinks producer run, and where do they disconnect?

Most producers run production, direct sales, club or ecommerce, and accounting as four separate systems, and the tax and compliance figures need data from all four. A mid sized winery might make wine in vintrace, sell at the cellar door through a POS, run its club in Troly or Commerce7, sell online through Shopify and wholesale through a distributor, then do the books in Xero. A brewery or distillery looks similar with Ekos or Orderly in production and a taproom POS.

Figure you have to get right	Data it needs	Where that data lives
WET and producer rebate	Taxable value per dealing, channel, buyer’s quote, eligibility	Sales systems, invoices, production records
Beer or spirits excise	Volume and strength delivered for home consumption, rate period	Production and dispatch records
Excise remission used	Remission applied per return against the annual cap	Excise returns, finance
LIP records	Vintage, variety and GI from vineyard to bottle	Production, grower contracts
Container deposit volumes	Eligible containers supplied into each state per month	Dispatch and sales by state

No single product owns that whole table. The typical failure is a finance manager rebuilding these figures each month from exports, which is slow and easy to get wrong.

How does WET flow through your sales data?

WET is 29% of the taxable value of assessable dealings, and the taxable value depends on the kind of sale, so every sale needs to carry its channel and price basis. The ATO says that for a wholesale sale the taxable value is the price the wine is sold for before WET and GST, which may include freight or be reduced by settlement discounts or volume rebates. Retail sales and own use have their own methods, and non arm’s length sales must use arm’s length prices.

The producer rebate then gives back WET up to an annual cap. The ATO lists the cap as $400,000 from 1 July 2026, $350,000 from 1 July 2018 to 30 June 2026, and $500,000 before that. For 2018 and later vintages you must be the producer, own source product making up at least 85% of the wine’s volume through the process, and sell in containers of 5 litres or less (51 litres for cider and perry) branded with a trademark you or an associate owns.

For software, the practical requirements are:

1. Tag each sale with channel (cellar door, club, online, wholesale, export) and the price used for WET.
2. Flag rebate eligibility per product from production data, not by hand.
3. Track rebate claimed year to date against the cap, including associated entities.
4. Produce a reconciliation your accountant can review before the BAS.

The logic must be checked by your accountant or a registered tax agent. Our job would be making the data complete and consistent.

What do beer and spirits excise calculations involve?

Excise is charged per litre of alcohol, with rates set by product type, strength and container, and indexed every February and August. The ATO’s rates from 3 August 2026 include $65.03 per litre of alcohol for packaged beer above 3.5% in containers under 8 litres, $43.39 for the same strength in kegs over 48 litres, and $110.15 for spirits and other beverages above 10%. Beer excise is payable on the alcohol content above 1.15%.

Worked example. A 4.5% beer in 375 ml cans has 4.5 minus 1.15, or 3.35%, of dutiable alcohol. That is 0.375 × 0.0335 = 0.01256 litres of alcohol per can. At $65.03, excise is about $0.82 a can, or about $19.61 for a 24 can case, before any remission. Your accountant should confirm the method for your products.

Three things make this hard to keep right in spreadsheets:

• Rate periods. Product delivered before and after each indexation date uses different rates, so dispatch dates matter.
• The draught freeze. The ATO says rates for subitems 1.2, 1.6 and 1.11 are unchanged for 2 years from 4 August 2025, with indexation resuming in August 2027.
• The remission cap. Eligible manufacturers can apply a full automatic remission up to $400,000 per financial year from 1 July 2026 ($350,000 from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2026), pro rata for a partial first year, and must keep records of how much they have applied. Wine subject to WET is excluded. The ATO also says it expanded compliance activity on the scheme from July 2026.

A custom excise module reads dispatches from your production system, applies the right rate per period, tracks remission used against the cap and prepares the return figures for review.

What records does Wine Australia expect?

If a label claims a vintage, variety or geographical indication, you need an auditable trail back to the vineyard. Wine Australia’s Label Integrity Program, under Part VIA of the Wine Australia Act 2013, applies to growers, wineries, packagers, anyone who supplies or receives wine goods, and agents who take possession of them. It doesn’t prescribe how records are kept, only what they must show, so a production system plus good intake records usually covers it.

Gaps appear with bought in fruit or bulk wine, contract making and complex blends. A small tool that links grower delivery dockets, supply statements and blend records into one trail per bottling can save days during an audit. Exporters also need a Wine Australia licence where individual shipments exceed 100 litres, which adds product and shipment records to keep aligned.

How do container deposit schemes affect your reporting?

If you are the first supplier of eligible containers into NSW or the ACT, you have to join the scheme and report what you supply every month. Exchange for Change, the scheme coordinator, says it is unlawful to supply eligible containers in NSW without a supply arrangement. First suppliers must get approval for each eligible container, meet labelling, barcode and lid requirements, and report supply volumes by the 15th of each month for the previous month.

Other states run their own schemes with their own coordinators and portals. If you ship beer, spirits or ready to drink products nationally, your dispatch data needs the destination state and container type for every line, so monthly volumes per scheme come out of the system rather than a stocktake guess.

What rules shape wine and beer clubs?

From 1 July 2027, automatically renewing clubs will be subscription contracts with disclosure and exit requirements. The Unfair Trading Practices Act 2026 defines subscription contracts to include indefinite and automatically renewing arrangements. Before a member joins, you must state that it is a subscription contract and disclose charges, the period, renewal, any notice needed and how to end it. Once running, you must give an exit that is easy to find and straightforward, and an online exit if members can join online.

Clubs also need to handle failed payments, member pauses and shipment holds, and to verify age. If you deliver same day in NSW, Liquor and Gaming NSW requires approved Responsible Supply of Alcohol Training for anyone involved in delivery, age verification at purchase and at the door (with ID checks for anyone who looks under 25), records of refused deliveries, and delivery only between 9am and midnight Monday to Saturday and 9am to 11pm Sunday. An online shop or club platform should enforce those hours and capture the verification method used.

How do vintrace, Ekos or Orderly connect with Shopify, Xero and distributors?

Usually through each product’s API or its built in connectors, with a small integration service handling the cases connectors miss. Typical jobs are: pushing stock levels from production to Shopify and the club platform, creating Xero invoices with WET or excise lines correctly coded, sending distributor orders and receiving depletion reports, and producing one sales view across channels. Check which connectors your vendors already support before building anything; our Xero and MYOB integration service covers the accounting side.

What do drinks producer builds cost?

Reporting and integration on top of your existing platforms is the usual scope. These are indicative AUD market ranges, ex GST, not quotes, consistent with the bands Expeed publishes for Australian custom software.

Build	Indicative range
WET or excise reporting from production and sales data	$15,000 to $40,000
Container deposit volume reporting by state	$10,000 to $25,000
Wine club and cellar door integration with ecommerce and Xero	$25,000 to $70,000
LIP traceability tool linking intake, blends and bottlings	$20,000 to $45,000

Costs depend on how many systems are involved and how clean their APIs are. Our API integration cost guide explains the drivers.

How AWLabs approaches drinks producer projects

We haven’t worked with a winery, brewery or distillery yet, and we aren’t tax agents, so we’d work alongside your accountant rather than replace their judgement. The process is a Development Consult, then a paid Discovery Audit that maps your systems and checks their APIs (its fee is credited in full against the build), then a fixed price Schedule of Work in three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build, and you’ll see progress every Tuesday and Friday. Our API development service and manufacturing industry page describe the wider work. This page is general information, not tax or legal advice.