Getting started

Here you will find simple, stripped-down instructions for the steps that get BrewOS up and running for you. The guide is not meant to be followed to the letter; it is a general example of the kind of steps getting started usually involves.

Getting started requires that you first register as a BrewOS user and open an account for your company (see My account). Registering and opening an account are free of charge.

You only need to buy a BrewOS licence for your account once you want to record a production batch as packaged into stock or mark products as shipped from stock.

Note: An account for which no BrewOS licence has been bought is closed and deleted automatically if it has not been used for 6 months. See BrewOS fees for details.

The user interface in brief

You open the account's pages from the main menu, which in the new look is on the left edge of the page (on a narrow screen it opens from the menu button in the top bar). The menu items are grouped like this:

home – the account's Snapshot
Production: ingredients, recipes and batches
Warehouse: warehouses, products and catalogue
Sales: customers, shipments, invoicing and reports
in addition settings (owners only), files and event log.

A sales user's menu has only catalogue, customers and shipments. See Accounts and users.

The top bar contains:

the language choice: you can choose Finnish (suomi), Swedish (svenska) or English as the language of the user interface and the help pages
Old look – go back to the previous look. In the old look the same place reads New look, which takes you back. The new look is everyone's default; the pages' functions and data are the same in both.
accounts – all the accounts you have access to
your own name – My account
sign out – sign out.

BrewOS remembers your language and look choices also when you sign in with another browser.

(1) Settings

Once you have created a user ID for yourself and a BrewOS account for your company, it is worth going through all the account settings. You will find the settings on the tabs of settings in the main menu. The settings are visible only to the account's owners.

Settings > Company details

Add your company's general details to the system. They are used in various documents, such as the invoices and delivery notes you send. The fields on the page are Company name, Business ID, Excise number, Email, Phone (sales), E-invoicing address, Postal address, Default shipment cover note (the standard text printed on packing lists) and Logo. For contact details (email and phone number) it is best to use your sales contact details first and foremost.

Fill in at least the Business ID: without it, BrewOS licences cannot be invoiced to the account.

Settings > Invoicing

Define the settings used in invoicing. The settings are

Invoice number from which invoicing starts. This setting only matters if you use BrewOS as your invoicing system. If your invoices go out through ProCountor, invoice numbering takes place in ProCountor and the field is not shown. In its place you choose VAT in invoicing (Domestic or Domestic, cash basis), the default for invoices transferred to ProCountor.
Payment terms, set by default on new invoices.
Account number, shown on invoices as the payment instruction
Default cover note, attached to the invoices you send. This setting only matters if you use BrewOS as your invoicing system.

The E-invoices section at the bottom of the page shows which system invoices are sent through (Sending), and from there you can reach the settings of each invoicing integration. One system is in use at a time, and it is marked with the Enabled badge.

Maventa settings – if you send invoices created in BrewOS as e-invoices via Maventa
Procountor settings – see Procountor
Netvisor settings – see Netvisor
Netbaron settings – see Netbaron
Fennoa settings – see Fennoa

Settings > Payment methods

If you use BrewOS as your invoicing system, define the different payment methods you use on this page.

Settings > Customer groups

BrewOS lets you group customers into customer groups you define. The grouping is used in, among other things, reporting (you can view e.g. sales by group) and pricing (each group can have its own pricing).

Create the groups by giving their names.

A good idea may be to divide customers into at least, say, "on-trade" and "retail". You can of course use a more detailed breakdown if it makes sense for your business.

By clicking a group's name you can also give the group its own Payment terms, which are used for the group's customers instead of the general payment terms.

Note that you can also create more groups later if needed.

Products > EAN codes

Register the EAN codes you use in the system. The EAN codes page opens from the EAN codes button on the products page. They are entered with the Add EAN number range button by giving the first and last product code of the number range. Only add your own company's number ranges here. The code of another manufacturer's product is recorded on the product's page in the Valvira product number field.

Once the number ranges have been created, you can use them in two different ways:

you can assign them to a product created in BrewOS; the product code is then shown on, among other things, packing lists.
you can mark them as used by writing a note for them, e.g. a historical product name, if you are not bringing the product into BrewOS.

By marking all used codes you can easily make sure that codes are not accidentally used twice. See EAN codes.

Settings > Authorities

In the authority settings, set

Alcohol trade register Allu: your Allu account's apikey, if you want to send Valvira's delivery and packaging reports straight from BrewOS. See Valvira.
Tax Administration VeroAPI: the Suomi.fi authorisation for sending excise duty returns from BrewOS. See Suomi.fi authorisation for VeroAPI.
Palpa / Small producer: any Palpa membership or registered small producer status that exempts you from the beverage packaging tax. In the same section you can hide the beverage packaging tax deadline reminders on the home page.
Retail licence: your retail licence number, if you also sell at retail.

The small brewery discount is no longer set in the authority settings. BrewOS determines the discount tier of each production batch from how much beer has been produced during the year. The year's details, such as beer produced outside BrewOS, are recorded on the page Reports > Small brewery and beverage packaging tax relief. See Excise duty.

The warehouses' Valvira and Tax Administration warehouse numbers are set on each warehouse's own Settings tab (see Finished product stock below).

Settings > Users

Add all the different people who work with your company with the create new user button. You can give the people you choose access to your BrewOS account by also adding their email addresses and a role (Owner, Basic user or Sales user); they then receive an email invitation to log in to the service and choose a password.

If you do not give a person's email address, they appear only as an employee, e.g. on task lists. See Accounts and users.

Settings > Licence

On the licence page you can add BrewOS licences and service credits to your account. You do not need them straight away, though, only once you record packagings into stock or release products for shipment from your warehouse.

Settings > AI agents

Here you connect your BrewOS account to an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT, and manage the agents and other applications you have given access to the account's data. Each user sees and manages only their own connections. See OAuth and the AI interface (MCP).

Settings > Webshops

If you have your own webshop, you can connect it to BrewOS: the webshop fetches products, prices and available stock from BrewOS and passes orders to BrewOS as shipments. Add the webshop on this page and give its API key to the webshop's developer. The guide for the developer is the webshop API developer guide.

Settings > Data export

Here you can download all of your account's data as a single file. See Data export.

(2) Products

After the settings it is worth creating all your products in BrewOS, since only then can product-related actions such as stock entries or pricing be carried out.

NOTE !! Before creating products it is worth understanding the two levels of BrewOS's product concepts: when you create the first product, you also create its first package type. If you offer the same beer in other package types as well, do not create the new package type as a new product; add the new package type from the original product's home page with the create new package size / type button.

When you create a new package size or type for an existing product, the system treats the beer they contain as the same beer. This makes it possible, among other things, to report internally per beer rather than per package.

Finished product stock

Record your existing stock of finished products in BrewOS stock accounting; after that you can start recording shipments to your customers.

A new account has no warehouses yet. Create the warehouses on the warehouses page in the main menu with the Create new warehouse button. Then open the warehouse's Settings tab and give the warehouse the warehouse number granted by Valvira (Valvira) and the Tax Administration's warehouse number (Tax Administration). They are needed in the reports to the authorities.

The opening stock is entered warehouse by warehouse if you have more than one warehouse. On the warehouses page, choose Finished products for the warehouse. This opens the warehouse's finished products view (Ingredients opens the raw materials view).

Record each individual product separately on the Entries tab of the finished products view. Select the product to record from the products you have registered in BrewOS, give the quantity of products to record and press Record.

If you wish, you can also give a cost for each entry. The cost is given as the production cost of the whole entry, excluding VAT and excise duty. The cost is used to calculate the value of the stock and for margin calculation.

The explanation is also optional for an entry, but it is worth writing in it that this is opening stock, so that you can tell these products apart from products later created through BrewOS.

NOTE !! A manually added purchase batch is not included in the packaging report by default! If some of the products have not yet been reported in a packaging report and you want to include them in the report BrewOS makes, tick Include this batch in the packaging report.

If the batch is not included in the packaging report (for example opening stock or bought-in beer), choose under Small brewery discount the discount tier in which the batch's beer is declared on the excise duty return. A batch included in the packaging report is your own production and gets its tier automatically.

Pricing

Pricing is not strictly mandatory, as you can also give prices separately for each shipment. This is, however, slow and prone to human error.

To begin with, it makes sense to give all products a "General price" on the products page (the Prices and stock view). The general price is always used unless the shipment's customer has a contract price or the customer's customer group (if any) has a customer group price. Click the general price cell on the product row and enter the product's wholesale price excluding VAT.

If you have defined customer groups, you can select them one at a time from the drop-down menu to the right of the "General price" column. You can then click the product row's cell in the drop-down menu's column and enter the price that applies to the product in that customer group.

Customer-specific contract price lists are created through the customer's home page.

(3) Customers

Note that BrewOS defines customers by Business ID. The same Business ID cannot be used for two different BrewOS customers.

A customer can, however, have several delivery locations. For example, a restaurant company may have several restaurants, each of which is its own delivery location, but the customer is always the same as long as the Business ID stays the same.

A new customer is created on the customers page in the main menu with the create new customer button. When you enter the Business ID, BrewOS fetches the company's official name and postal address from YTJ and warns you if there already is a customer with that Business ID or if the company has no alcohol licence in force. You can also look up the customer in Valvira's licence register with the browse alcohol licence register option. Foreign customers are created with the Create export customer button (see Export customers).

Existing customers

As a rule, you do not need to import old customer data into BrewOS when you start using the service. Customers can be created in BrewOS as you make shipments to them.

Customer data is not imported from financial management software into BrewOS; customers are maintained in BrewOS. If you invoice through ProCountor or Netvisor and your financial management software has a customer with a matching Business ID when you invoice a new shipment, BrewOS links to it and assigns the invoice being created to that customer in the financial management software. Otherwise BrewOS creates the customer in the financial management software. This keeps the invoicing history in the financial management software unbroken.

(4) Productions

If you have unfinished or recently completed productions, you can also create them in BrewOS if you wish. This may be useful because, even if you do not record everything that production accounting allows, such as raw material consumption, you can still number and package them in BrewOS.

It is probably easier, though, to start recording productions in BrewOS from the next new production that begins.