How much time is admin really costing your drinks business?

Ingredients, packaging, equipment, energy, transport. When you think about the costs of running an independent drinks business, these are usually the things that come to mind first. They’re visible, measurable and relatively easy to keep an eye on.

Time is harder to account for.

Not the hours spent on work that needs doing, but the five minutes entering information for a second time. The ten minutes trying to work out where something is. Stopping production to update a record elsewhere. Switching between systems to find the information a customer needs.

Individually, these tasks barely register. Repeated across production, sales, deliveries and admin every day, they can become a significant hidden cost.

There’s an important distinction here. Raising an invoice is necessary admin. Entering the same information again to create a delivery is unnecessary duplication. Recording production information matters. Adding extra steps simply because two systems don’t communicate is operational friction.

And that friction can add up to far more than a few wasted minutes.

For Umbrella London, tackling these everyday inefficiencies has had a significant impact. Founder and Managing Director Matt Armitage estimates that the combined time savings are equivalent to a full admin person.

When your team becomes the thing connecting your systems

Most independent producers don’t deliberately create complicated processes. Systems tend to develop naturally as the business needs them. A spreadsheet might be introduced to track production, an accounting platform manages invoicing, and another tool helps organise deliveries.

Each solves a genuine problem. The difficulty comes when those systems need to work together but can’t.

When your systems don't talk to each other, your team ends up doing the talking for them.

That was the situation at Umbrella London, an independent producer of craft cider and ginger beer based at London’s only working cider house in Bethnal Green. Production and ingredients were managed through spreadsheets, deliveries through a separate third-party app, and invoicing in Sage.

With a small team, Matt is involved across the operation, overseeing logistics, production and admin while getting stuck into the practical work when needed.

“If we're short on drivers, I'll jump in a van. If we need to fill kegs, I'll start filling kegs. You do everything when you're a small business.”

In a team where people already wear multiple hats, the time spent bridging the gaps between systems becomes particularly valuable.

The admin you don't notice until you add it up

Before Breww, something as straightforward as responding to a customer could mean moving between different applications.

“If a customer asked for an invoice and a delivery note, I'd have to go into two different applications just to give it to them. And taking an order meant creating an invoice in Sage and then duplicating that effort by creating a delivery in a separate app.”

For a single order, that might not sound like a major problem. But multiply the same steps across every order and delivery, week after week, and the picture changes.

The same principle applied elsewhere in the operation. On the production floor, the brewer previously had to stop what he was doing, go to a computer and manually enter information. Now, he can record it on his phone while he works. Matt gives the example of filling from a tank, where the information can be logged in around five minutes there on the production floor.

The team has also made it easier to pick up where someone else left off. During a shift handover, someone coming in can see what’s in each tank, what’s been cleaned and what has already been completed, without Matt needing to ring around to find out what happened the previous day.

None of those changes sounds enormous in isolation. That’s exactly why this kind of lost time can be difficult to spot.

But across production, deliveries, invoicing and other day-to-day tasks, those minutes accumulate.

As Matt puts it: “I'd say we've probably saved the equivalent of a full admin person in terms of time.”

For an independent producer, that's not simply an admin saving. It’s capacity the team can use elsewhere in the business.

Losing time is one thing. Losing kegs is another.

Operational visibility can protect more than your team's time. Before using Breww, keg tracking was a significant challenge for Umbrella.

“Before Breww, we had absolutely no idea where our kegs were. We just lost track of them.”

Matt describes how other companies could accidentally collect them, or pubs could close with Umbrella’s kegs still sitting in a cellar. At around £70 per keg, and with hundreds needed at a reasonable scale, losing visibility means losing track of a valuable pool of assets.

Umbrella now scans each keg when it is filled, when it is delivered and when it comes back empty. That gives the team a clearer record of where its containers are throughout their journey.

Proof of delivery adds another layer of visibility. If a customer queries whether a keg was received, the team can refer back to who signed for the delivery and the accompanying photo. If a keg goes missing, they have a delivery record to work from.

It’s a useful reminder that good processes aren't about collecting information for the sake of it. The value comes from being able to find the right information when you actually need it.

Where is the friction in your operation?

Operational friction can be surprisingly difficult to spot because teams become very good at working around it. A process might not feel inefficient when you've followed it hundreds of times.

One way to uncover it is to look at the everyday tasks across your operation and ask:

• Are we entering the same information into more than one system?
• Does someone regularly have to stop what they're doing to update records elsewhere?
• Do handovers depend on speaking to someone who isn't there?
• Are we spending time trying to establish where stock, kegs or other containers are?
• If a key member of the team was away tomorrow, could somebody else easily find the information they need?

You don't need a dramatic operational problem for these questions to uncover something worthwhile. Umbrella's experience shows how the opportunity can sit across several ordinary tasks that happen often enough for relatively small savings to become significant.

You can't create more hours. But you can make better use of them.

For Umbrella, finding those efficiencies had a wider commercial purpose. Matt explains that the team was spending so much time on admin that it was taking them away from the core of the business: “producing, selling, and delivering”.

At the same time, passing every additional cost on to customers wasn't an attractive answer. With hospitality businesses facing their own cost pressures, Umbrella needed to look internally for ways to become more efficient.

That doesn't mean cutting necessary admin. Independent producers need accurate production records, traceability, invoicing, stock information and reliable delivery records.

The opportunity is to remove the duplicated work surrounding those processes.

A few minutes saved here or there might not seem transformational. But when those minutes are being lost every day, across several people and several areas of the operation, they're worth finding.

You can't create more hours in the working day. But you can look carefully at where they're going.

Could Breww give your team some time back?

Umbrella brought production, sales, invoicing, deliveries and keg tracking together in Breww, reducing the manual work happening between separate systems and giving the team better visibility across the operation.

With a free Breww test account, you can explore the platform in your own time and see where Breww could help remove unnecessary admin from the way your team works.

No pressure. No commitment. Just a chance to see where you could get some of that time back.