Step 1 - Set up your books right

The Fundamental Five

Get your books set up right with a winery-specific system that helps you clean up your QuickBooks file, organize your workflow, and create a financial foundation you can actually use.

If your QuickBooks file feels messy, inconsistent, or harder to use than it should be, you are not alone.

Fundamental Five is the first step in The Path — designed to help small wineries build a clean financial foundation so the numbers in your file are actually useful.

Choose Your Version Explore the Path

Why this comes first

Before you can calculate your true cost, interpret reports, or make better financial decisions, you need a clean financial foundation.

That’s what the Fundamental Five is designed to help you build.

It gives small wineries a winery-specific bookkeeping structure so your numbers:

• make more sense
• stay more consistent
• and become more useful for running the business

Because if the books are messy, everything else feels harder.

What is the Fundamental Five

The five key pieces that help your books work better

We call our system the Fundamental Five because it focuses on the five setup areas that create a cleaner, more useful bookkeeping system for your winery.

Here’s what each part helps you improve:

  • Your Chart of Accounts → for cleaner reports

  • Your Inventory Setup → for better tracking

  • Your Sales by Channel → for clearer visibility

  • Your POS / eCommerce Workflow → for cleaner data flow

  • Your Samples, Pours & Shrinkage Tracking → for more accurate inventory numbers

Why wineries get stuck

A lot of small wineries are trying to make important decisions using books that are:

• cluttered
• inconsistent
• behind
• hard to understand
• or simply not set up for how wineries actually operate

That creates a lot of frustration.

Because when your books are not structured well, it becomes much harder to:

• trust your reports
• stay on top of workflow
• understand performance by sales channel
• or build the next layers of financial clarity

The Fundamental Five helps fix that foundation first.

What is the Fundamental Five?→

The foundation of your winery finances.

3 Ways you can do the Fundamental Five

As small winery finance and strategy specialists, we make it our mission to meet winery owners where they are in their business journey. The Fundamental Five is always the first step and we’ve created three ways you can implement it. Let us help find the right one for you!

  • Self-Paced

    Best For:
    People who want to work through the system on their own schedule.

    Great if you:
    • like to learn independently
    • want the most flexible option
    • are comfortable implementing as you go

    If you decide later that you want more support, you’ll have the option to join a future cohort

    Sign Up $675

  • Cohort

    Best For:
    People who want structure, deadlines, and the energy of learning with others.

    Great if you:
    • want accountability momentum
    • like learning with others
    • want support while you implement

    The Cohort is offered 4 times per year and includes the same course plus a live learning experience.

    More Details

Not sure which version is right for you?

Here’s the simple way to decide:

Start with Self-Paced if …
you want to get started right away and prefer to work through the material on your own schedule.

Choose the Cohort if …
you want structure, live support, and the momentum of working through the course with a group.

Add Coaching if …
you want more personalized help applying the material to your specific winery.

No matter which version you choose, the goal is the same:
to help you move from messy books to a cleaner, more useful financial foundation.

Ready to get your books working better?

Start with Step 1
If your QuickBooks file feel harder than they should, this is the place to start.

Start Self-Paced Learn about the Cohort