Spirits inventory forgives slowness — beer doesn't. Beer expires in months, turns over in days, and ties up cooler space that has a real cost per shelf. Wine adds vintage and variant complexity. If your shop leans beer or wine, your inventory discipline needs three extra habits.

Habit 1 — First-in, first-out, enforced at stacking

Beer's shelf life (typically ~6 months for Indian lagers) makes rotation a money rule: new cases go behind, older stock sells first. The inventory system's job is the early warning — velocity per SKU. If a beer SKU's days-of-stock exceeds its remaining shelf life, you're stocking a future write-off. A sales register with per-SKU daily counts (see the register guide) gives you this number for free.

Habit 2 — Cooler space is rented by margin

The cooler is the most valuable real estate in a beer shop. Each facing should earn its keep: monthly, rank cooler SKUs by margin × velocity and demote the laggards to warm shelves. You can only run this ranking if sales are recorded per SKU per day — which is exactly what a digital register produces.

Habit 3 — Case-pack arithmetic, automated

Beer arrives in 12s and 24s (650ml vs 330ml differ), wine in 6s and 12s. Receiving "18 cases + 7 loose" must convert to bottles correctly every time — a classic manual-entry error that AI purchase scanning handles by reading cases and bottles as separate, cross-checked quantities.

Wine's extra dimension: the variant problem

The "same" wine exists across vintages and MRP revisions, and two bottles with the same label can legitimately carry different prices. Inventory systems must treat these as distinct variants, not duplicates to merge — otherwise margins and stock counts blur across price points. (Liquor Pro's catalogue models brand + size + MRP as the product identity, so two-MRP SKUs coexist cleanly.)

Seasonality: plan stock by the calendar

Beer: summer peaks can triple off-season velocity — reorder cycles must shorten before the heat, not after the first stock-out weekend.
Wine: festival and wedding seasons concentrate months of demand into weeks; last year's same-month sales report is the ordering guide.

One number to watch weekly: days-of-stock per cooler SKU (current stock ÷ average daily sales). Under 3 days: reorder now. Over 30 days for beer: stop reordering and rotate it out.

Beer & Wine Inventory: The Different Rules