What is beverage depletion data?
Beverage depletion data records a distributor's sales to retail and on-premise accounts. It tells a supplier what sold, where it sold, which product moved, and when the transaction occurred.
By John, founder of Bevbase and Montagave Tequila · Updated September 17, 2026
The short answer
In the three-tier beverage system, a supplier sells product to a distributor and the distributor sells it to an account. The first transaction is a shipment. The second is a depletion. Depletion reports give a beverage brand its most direct recurring view of distributor-to-account sales.
Shipments, depletions, and consumer sales
What is in a depletion report?
Most depletion reports include an account, transaction date, product, quantity, and market. Many also include account addresses, channels, distributor branches, revenue, or case-equivalent values. The difficult part is consistency: different distributors use different column names, product names, account identifiers, date formats, and file layouts.
How should a beverage brand use depletion data?
A useful depletion workflow goes beyond totaling cases. Normalize the incoming files, match duplicate accounts and product aliases, compare each account with its prior order pattern, and connect the result to the next sales action.
- 1
Normalize the reports. Map each distributor's columns into one consistent structure and reconcile account and SKU names.
- 2
Measure performance. Review cases, revenue, velocity, distribution, and prior-period changes by account, product, market, and channel.
- 3
Find exceptions. Identify accounts that are growing, slowing, newly active, or overdue relative to their normal reorder cadence.
- 4
Create the next action. Assign follow-up to the right owner and keep the account's notes, opportunities, tasks, and order history together.
Where Bevbase fits
Bevbase imports distributor reports, lets a team review mappings and matches, and publishes approved data into sales reporting, account records, and store-locator workflows. The same workspace connects historical sales with CRM activity, so the team can move from “what happened?” to “what should we do next?”
Frequently asked questions
What does depletion mean in the beverage industry?
A depletion is a distributor sale to an account, such as a retailer, restaurant, or bar. It represents product leaving the distributor's inventory and entering the trade, not necessarily a purchase by the final consumer.
What is the difference between shipments and depletions?
A shipment is product sold by a supplier to a distributor. A depletion is product sold by the distributor to an account. Shipments measure distributor inventory coming in; depletions measure distributor inventory going out to the trade.
Is depletion data the same as point-of-sale data?
No. Depletion data usually ends at the distributor-to-account transaction. Point-of-sale data records the account's sale to the final consumer. Both are useful, but they describe different stages of the supply chain.
What fields are usually in a depletion report?
A typical report includes transaction date, account name and address, product or SKU, quantity, case equivalents, distributor, market, and sometimes revenue or channel. Formats vary by distributor.