Vinify vs. spreadsheets for wine inventory
The honest comparison. A spreadsheet is free, flexible and familiar, and for some cellars it is genuinely enough. This page says where that stops being true, and what changes when the cellar becomes a record that updates itself.
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cellar.xlsx
Montrose2020
Lynch-Bages2018Who should keep the spreadsheet
A snapshot against a record
The spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a snapshot: right at the moment somebody saved it, and quietly wrong from then on. It cannot hear the till, does not know a glass from a bottle, and every list printed from it starts aging the moment it leaves the printer. Its accuracy is one person’s discipline, every day, forever.
The cellar on record
In Vinify the cellar is a live table every other feature reads. Sales are imported from the till, a glass comes off the open bottle in centiliters, the wine lists read the same stock and drop what ran out, and a count starts from live numbers instead of an empty column.
Three jobs a spreadsheet was never built for
Sales the file never hears about
Every bottle the till sells is an edit somebody owes the spreadsheet, and service nights do not leave time for bookkeeping. The gap between sold and recorded is exactly where variance lives.
Vinify connects to the till and imports the sales, on most systems each morning: a bottle as a bottle, a glass as its centiliters off the open bottle, each movement written into cellar history.
How the till connectsThe menu that drifts from the shelf
A list exported from a file is right until the first bottle sells out. Then the guest orders it anyway, and the evening starts with an apology.
Vinify’s wine lists read the cellar: the live link and the QR code rebuild from it each time they open, the PDF prints the same list, a wine at zero falls off the live list on its own, and the lists print in English and Norwegian.
See wine lists
Digital wine listCounting against a blank column
A spreadsheet count means walking the cellar with an empty column and typing everything again, then reconciling it against a file that was already stale.
A Vinify stock count starts from live numbers, runs location by location with a switch for uncounted wines only, updates the cellar as you confirm each line of the current count, and keeps its report as PDF or Excel. Stock count is part of Pro.
See stock countWhat the spreadsheet still wins
It is free, offline and infinitely flexible
No subscription, no onboarding, no opinion about your columns. A spreadsheet bends to any convention you invent, works with no connection, and never asks you to change how you think. For a private list of forty bottles updated on Sundays, that is not a compromise; it is the right tool.
Vinify’s counterpart costs money: Starter at €39 a month billed yearly, or €49 monthly, after the 14-day free trial, with the plans laid out on the pricing page. The trial exists precisely so the file and the cellar can be compared on your own wine, not on this page’s word.
Where the flexibility turns on you
The same freedom that makes the file easy makes it fragile: a vintage typed into the wrong row, a magnum counted as two bottles, a formula someone broke in March. Vinify is opinionated on purpose: vintage and bottle size are data on every wine, locations are real places, and sales, removals and new wines land in history with a date, so the record can be trusted without being policed.
From file to cellar without the retype
Upload the file you have
The spreadsheet you keep today is the import: AI wine import reads it, proposes matches against Vinify’s wine database, and only the rows you confirm land in the cellar.
Let the cellar take the arithmetic
From then on the till’s sales, the glass pours and the wine lists work off the same live table, and the file’s daily maintenance simply stops existing.
Let the trial decide
Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no charge today. Run both in parallel for two weeks if you like; the one you stop updating is your answer.
The comparison, row by row
Step by step, from the file to the cellar
That is the intended path: upload the file as Excel or CSV (a CellarTracker export, a PDF invoice or a photo work too), AI wine import proposes matches line by line, and you confirm every row before it lands. Your columns do not need to match anything in advance.
Maybe not. If nothing sells by the glass, no till is involved and the monthly edit is not painful, the file is doing its job. The comparison tips when sales outrun the editing, which in a venue is usually the first busy week.
The record does not lock you in: the whole cellar exports to Excel from cellar settings, stock counts export their reports as PDF or Excel, and the wine lists export as PDF or Excel.
No. The cellar, the lists, the import and the counts all work without a till; POS integration is an add-on for when you want sales deducted for you. Without it, you update quantities in the app instead of in a file, and history dates what goes out.
Starter is €39 a month and Pro €99 billed yearly, or €49 and €129 on monthly billing, each after a 14-day free trial with no charge today; the totals are on the pricing page. What the file costs instead is the daily editing and the nights the numbers are wrong.
Bring the spreadsheet Leave the arithmetic
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The numbers first? See pricing