Point of sale systems for breweries and taprooms in Arkansas
The taproom and the brewhouse are two different problems. This page covers flights, fills, keg depletion and Arkansas beverage tax on a taproom check.
A taproom point of sale has to ring flights, pour sizes and growler fills off a tap list that changes every week, and it has to tax beer differently than spirits. SkyTab and Clover both handle the taproom side. Neither is a brewery management system. There is no batch tracking, no TTB reporting and no wholesale invoicing in either one.
In this article
01How do I build a flight so it prices and pours correctly?02Can the system track a keg down to the ounce?03How does Arkansas beverage tax hit a taproom check?04Does the point of sale help with distribution or just the taproom?05How do I keep the tap list current without retyping it everywhere?06Questions restaurant owners ask
“We are not mosquitoes. You will not be swatting us away. But we are not disappearing after the install either.”
How do I build a flight so it prices and pours correctly?
A flight rings as one item with a set number of required beer choices attached as modifiers. The guest picks four, the bartender taps four, and the ticket shows which four. That structure also lets the system deplete each of those beers separately even though the guest paid one price.
It gets fiddly when your beers sit at different price tiers. If a barrel aged stout costs more in a flight than a house lager, you either accept one flat flight price and eat the difference, or you build upcharge modifiers on the higher tier beers. We ask which you want before programming, because retrofitting it means touching every beer.
Can the system track a keg down to the ounce?
It can subtract what you sell. A keg gets set up as inventory with a total volume, and every taster, pour, flight and fill draws that number down. What the system cannot see is foam, line loss, a bad pour or the sample you handed the sales rep. Depletion is an estimate and the gap between estimated and actual is where your real cost sits.
Neither SkyTab nor Clover integrates with keg flow meters out of the box, so there is no automatic reconciliation between what poured and what was rung. If you need that level of accuracy, it is a separate system. What the point of sale gives you honestly is a good running estimate and a fast answer to which beers move.
How does Arkansas beverage tax hit a taproom check?
Not evenly, which is why tax groups matter. In Fayetteville, prepared food carries a combined rate of 11.75%, and the city's 5% supplemental beverage tax applies to spirits while excluding wine, beer and malt beverages under 5% ABW. So a draft list and a cocktail list on the same check do not carry the same rate.
Check the alcohol by weight figure against your own beers rather than assuming, because that threshold is written in ABW and most brewers publish ABV. We build tax groups against your city and your permit and we test them with a mixed check before install day. Arkansas has 75 counties and local rates layered on state rates, so a taproom in Fayetteville and one in Little Rock do not share a build.
A real person calls you back within two hours, Monday to Saturday, 8am to 7pm Central.
Does the point of sale help with distribution or just the taproom?
Just the taproom. Neither platform does wholesale invoicing, distributor pricing, keg deposits tracked by account or the paperwork that comes with selling outside your own four walls. If you self distribute, you will keep whatever you use for that today.
The same goes upstream. Batch tracking, fermentation records, raw material inventory and federal reporting live in brewery software or a spreadsheet, and they will continue to. Any dealer who tells you a restaurant point of sale replaces your brewery system has not looked at your paperwork.
How do I keep the tap list current without retyping it everywhere?
Beers get marked available or unavailable in the point of sale, which controls what the bartender sees and what shows on online ordering. Neither platform pushes that to a digital tap board on the wall automatically. Most Arkansas taprooms end up with a chalkboard or a screen driven by something separate, and someone updates it when a keg blows.
We build the beer items as a reusable list so adding a new release is a short edit rather than a new build. That much we can make painless. Syncing the wall board is a third party job and we will tell you which ones people actually use.
Where SkyTab and Clover suit a taproom, and where the brewery side is left out
Both run the front of the taproom properly and neither touches the brewhouse, which is the honest split.
What works
- Flights ring as one item with the chosen beers attached and each beer depleted separately.
- Taster, half pour, full pour and growler fills all sit on the same beer item.
- Separate tax groups on one check so beer and spirits ring at the correct Arkansas rates.
- Handhelds cover a patio, a beer garden or an event space without a walk to the bar.
What does not
- No batch tracking, fermentation records, raw material inventory or federal reporting. This is not brewery software.
- No wholesale or distribution invoicing, distributor pricing or keg deposit tracking by account.
- Keg depletion is an estimate. Neither platform integrates with flow meters, so foam and line loss never appear.
- Digital tap list boards do not sync automatically from either system, so the wall is still updated by hand.
- Tiered flight pricing takes extra modifier work and stays fragile whenever the tap list turns over quickly.
Questions restaurant owners ask
Can guests run a tab in the taproom?
Yes. Tabs open by card or name and stay visible to whoever is behind the bar, with a pre authorization when the card is presented. Those holds expire, so a nightly routine for clearing open tabs matters here as much as it does in a nightclub. We set that routine with your closing staff during install.
Do you handle the tax setup or do I give it to my accountant?
We build it and your accountant should check it. We ask for your city, your permit type and your menu, then we build tax groups so beer, spirits, wine and food each calculate correctly on the same check. Then we run test checks with mixed items so you can see the math before the first guest does.
What happens to my beer list when a keg blows mid shift?
A bartender marks the beer unavailable from the terminal or a handheld, and it disappears from the ordering screens and from online ordering. It does not change the board on your wall. That step stays manual on both platforms, and it is worth writing into the closing checklist so nobody forgets.
We have a kitchen too. Does that complicate anything?
It adds printer or kitchen display routing and a second set of tax groups, both of which we build before hardware ships. A taproom kitchen is usually simpler than a full restaurant kitchen, so the work is in getting food and beverage taxed separately and routed to the right station rather than in menu volume.
Do you cover taprooms outside northwest Arkansas?
Yes, all 75 counties. We install in person from Bentonville and Fayetteville through Little Rock and Hot Springs and out into the Ozarks. Judd Alsup leads the Arkansas team and is on site on go live night. A real person calls you back within two hours, Monday to Saturday, 8am to 7pm Central.