WineawayCellarManagement

Wineaway is Queensland's largest fine wine storage facility, housing over 200,000 bottles across more than 1,000 client accounts. Every month, wine moves in and out — clients add to their collections, retrieve bottles for events, and the facility logs every movement against every locker.

The problem: all of that was being tracked on paper. At the end of each billing cycle, the business effectively stopped operating for three days while staff manually reconciled movement records, calculated charges, and produced invoices. It was unsustainable — and as the client base grew, it was only going to get worse.

Off-the-shelf inventory and billing software didn't fit the operational model. Wineaway charges per bottle, per movement — handling inwards, storage, retrieval — with client-specific pricing, locker assignments, and a physical workflow that needed to be reflected in real time in the system. They needed something custom.

We built a bespoke cellar management platform in 2008 that captures every wine movement as a transaction at the point it happens. Staff record wine in — by client, wine, vintage, variety, region, and locker — and wine out, whether that's a client retrieval, a move between lockers, or an outbound delivery. Every action creates a line item.

At the end of each billing cycle, the platform collates those transactions automatically, applies client-specific pricing rules, and produces invoices — which are pushed directly to Xero for accounting and to a secure payment gateway for processing. What took three days of manual work now runs overnight.

Clients get their own portal — a dashboard showing their full collection by variety, vintage, and region with live inventory totals, an insurance value tracker, transaction history, and the ability to place retrieval requests online. The management interface gives staff complete visibility over the cellar: locker assignments, inventory totals, pending collections, futures inventory, and tasting event scheduling.

The wine management layer covers the full taxonomy — wineries, varieties, regions, and vintages — so every bottle in the cellar is catalogued consistently. Tasting notes, event management, and futures trading were added over time as the platform matured.

Wineaway has been running on the platform since 2008 — over 16 years of continuous operation. The billing cycle that once shut the business down for three days now closes automatically. The cellar currently holds 216,088 bottles across 29,926 cases, all tracked in real time.

The Xero integration has eliminated manual reconciliation entirely. Invoices are generated, dispatched, and processed without staff intervention. Client accounts, locker assignments, and movement histories are accurate to the last transaction.

We continue to maintain and evolve the platform today. It's a case study in what custom software can deliver when built to fit an operation precisely: Wineaway has never needed to change how they work to fit the software — the software has always fit how they work.