How to Read a Distributor Depletion Report: A Craft Distiller's Guide

Purpose of this guide

The monthly distributor depletion report is the primary document governing a craft distillery's wholesale decisions. Most producers learned to read it through inference rather than instruction.

This guide is intended as the reference that generally does not exist: what each field measures, where interpretation commonly goes wrong, a repeatable process for reviewing a file efficiently, and an honest account of the questions the format is not built to answer. It is written for distilleries selling bourbon and other American whiskey through wholesale channels, though the mechanics apply broadly across spirits.

Foundational distinction: shipments, depletions, sell-through

Three measurements are frequently used interchangeably in conversation and refer to different events.

Shipments are cases transferred from the distillery to the distributor's warehouse. This corresponds to the producer's invoice and recognized revenue.

Depletions are cases transferred from the distributor's warehouse to a licensed account — a liquor store, bar, or restaurant. The industry generally treats this as the substantive commercial event, on the basis that inventory held in a distributor's warehouse represents working capital rather than realized demand (Pulse RevOps, Dimensional Insight).

Sell-through is product purchased by the end consumer at retail. Standard depletion reporting does not measure it.

The practical consequence concerns production planning. A large shipment period followed by flat depletion periods indicates inventory positioned in the distributor's warehouse rather than realized demand. A producer that plans a production run against a substantial load-in, without confirming corresponding depletion, may find the following period unexpectedly quiet — because the distributor's existing inventory covers the interval before the next purchase.

Stated concisely: shipments measure what was sold to the distributor. Depletions indicate whether it is moving.

Field reference

Report formats vary by distributor and jurisdiction. Most are an arrangement of the following fields, the majority of which originate in wholesaler systems that collect daily sales and depletion transactions and forward them to suppliers (VIP Supplier Reporting Services).

On the volume unit: nine-liter case equivalents are the standard normalization across the industry — SipSource, for example, reports depletion volume in 9L case equivalents across more than 144,000 products and 330,000 accounts (Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America). For a distillery selling 750ml and 1.75L formats of the same expression, comparing raw case counts across formats produces misleading results.

On jurisdiction: seventeen states operate under the control model, with state agencies holding a wholesale monopoly and, in thirteen jurisdictions, control at retail as well (National Alcohol Beverage Control Association). A distillery distributing in both Indiana and Virginia is reading two structurally different datasets.

Five common interpretation errors

1. Analyzing the total and stopping there. A quarterly total such as "340 cases, up from 310" is directionally reassuring and operationally inert. The total is the sum of accounts moving in both directions, and the aggregate conceals both. Two distilleries with identical totals can have materially different account-base health.

2. Treating account count as a measure of distribution. Placement in 180 accounts is a stronger figure than 90 only if those accounts reorder. A more useful measure is the count of accounts that have purchased at least twice, which excludes launch-period placements that never repeated. That number is typically smaller and considerably more informative.

3. Accepting account names as recorded. "Joe's Liquor," "Joes Liquors," "JOES LIQUOR #2," and "Joe's Liquor & Wine" may represent one location or four. Until account names are reconciled against a single chart of accounts, account-level conclusions are unreliable. This reconciliation is unglamorous and it is the prerequisite for everything downstream — it is also the most common reason a carefully built spreadsheet returns confidently incorrect answers.

4. Combining on-premise and off-premise in one view. A restaurant pouring two bottles weekly and a retailer selling two cases weekly can both present as steady. One is a by-the-glass pour program with different economics, reorder rhythm, and growth path than a retail placement. Blended analysis renders both illegible.

5. Reading case count without reference to rate. Days on hand — inventory divided by average daily rate of sale — expresses how long current inventory will last (Beer Business Finance). When that figure rises at a specific account, the rate of sale has declined even if the case count appears stable. Producers reading volume alone will read this as consistency.

A repeatable 30-minute review

The following sequence extracts most of the available signal from a monthly file.

1. Separate on-premise from off-premise. Two views, consistently, before any other step.
2. Build a twelve-month account trend grid. Accounts as rows, months as columns, cases as values. This single grid carries more information than any summary chart supplied with the report.
3. Identify accounts with three consecutive declining periods. Regardless of account size, this pattern warrants contact.
4. Identify single-purchase accounts. Accounts that purchased once during a launch period and did not repeat are placement activity rather than distribution.
5. Identify consistent small accounts. Accounts with short, regular reorder cycles at modest volume are frequently the strongest expansion candidates and never appear on a volume-ranked list.
6. Compare aggregate depletions against aggregate shipments. Where shipments have exceeded depletions across two or more periods, distributor inventory is elevated and production planning should reflect it.
7. For barrel programs, review by program rather than SKU. Group store-pick and single-barrel placements separately and compare rate of sale across the retailers holding them.

That final step deserves emphasis. Single-barrel and store-pick programs are now a standard channel, with nearly all private barrel orders sold to retailers and on-premise accounts (Whisky Advocate), and distilleries continue to formalize retail selection programs (Craft Spirits Magazine). Standard reporting records a barrel-pick case identically to a core-SKU case, so program-level performance must be constructed manually. Given that Kentucky alone entered 2025 holding a record 16.1 million barrels of aging bourbon (Kentucky Distillers' Association), evidence of which retail partners actually turn a barrel is directly relevant to how the next allocation is assigned.

What the format is not built to answer

Competence with the file has limits that are structural rather than analytical.

Current account state. The report documents a closed period delivered weeks after close. It can establish that an account's purchasing changed; it cannot indicate that an account is presently within days of depleting inventory, which is the form of the information a field schedule requires.

Attribution of in-market activity. There is no field for effort. A distillery running in-store tastings, festival pours, and rickhouse tours across a quarter has no mechanism within the report to connect that activity to the accounts that responded.

Prioritization of field time. A volume ranking identifies large accounts. It does not identify accounts where a visit has the highest marginal value, which is frequently a mid-sized account with improving velocity rather than a large account reordering predictably.

Present-tense visibility. The underlying data moves at daily frequency inside distributor systems, which is precisely what enterprise platforms package as daily depletion and inventory visibility across a supplier's network (VIP). Delivered to a craft producer as a monthly attachment, it is necessarily historical.

None of these limitations reflect information being withheld. They reflect a reporting format designed for compliance and settlement being applied to sales strategy, because for most producers in this revenue band no alternative has been priced within range.

The available options

Enterprise depletion platforms address these limitations effectively. They are also priced from approximately $40,000 annually and presume internal analytical staff. Below that threshold, the standard approach has been a manually maintained spreadsheet.

Craft distilleries in the $500,000 to $10 million revenue range occupy the interval between those options — producers with genuine multi-state complexity and active barrel programs, without an analytics function. ACSA data indicates the scale of the exposure: medium-sized craft distillers move 39.3% of volume out of state and large craft distillers 68.6% (Spirits & Distilling, reporting ACSA figures).

DepletionIQ was built for that interval. It ingests the distributor files a distillery already receives and maintains them as a continuous view: normalized purchase orders, account-level depletions, reorder signals at 8–14 days from depletion, barrel-pick tracking by account and program, tasting attribution, and a printable priority list for field visits. Pricing begins at $295 per month, with unlimited users and unlimited distributor accounts at every tier.

The objective is not greater proficiency with pivot tables. It is removing the requirement for them.

Apply this to your own file

If you maintain one of these reports, the fastest way to assess the gap is to compare your own reading of it against a structured one.

Send one month of distributor reports and we will return a live DepletionIQ view of your business within seven days, including account-level depletions, reorder signals, and an initial data audit. No contract and nothing to install.

At minimum, you receive a second, independent read of data you have been interpreting alone.