Shipments, depletions and POS are three measurements of the same case of beer, and they are not supposed to agree. One says what left your building. One says what left the distributor's warehouse. One says what left the shelf. Put all three on a slide and the differences look like an error in somebody's system. They almost never are.
The confusion costs real time. A sales meeting stalls while two people defend numbers that were never measuring the same thing, and the account that actually needed a call doesn't get discussed. It is worth ten minutes to fix permanently, because once you know which handoff each number describes, the gaps between them stop being noise and start being some of the most useful information you have.
The three handoffs
Most beverage volume in the U.S. moves through three parties: supplier, distributor, retail account. Each handoff leaves its own record, and each record is the source of one of the three numbers.
Shipments — supplier to distributor. What you invoiced and put on a truck. Sometimes called sell-in, or STW: sales to wholesaler. It lives in your own order system, so it is the number you control and the one your finance team recognizes.
Depletions — distributor to retail account. Cases the distributor sold out of its warehouse to a licensed bar, restaurant or store. Sometimes called sell-through, or STR: sales to retail. It comes back to you as distributor reporting, generally through VIP.
POS or scan — retail account to consumer. What the register rang up. It exists where a retailer shares scan data, which in practice means chain off-premise; on-premise almost never produces it at all.
Read in order, they are a chain of custody for a case of beer. Each number is accurate about its own handoff and completely silent about the other two. A case can ship in March, deplete in May and cross a register in June, and all three systems are right.
One caveat on the general shape: the three-tier chain is not identical everywhere. Some states operate control systems, and what gets reported — and by whom — varies by state and by product category. Take the three handoffs as the usual arrangement and confirm how your own states actually work.
Why they never match
There is no month in which these three numbers line up, and every reason for it is ordinary.
Inventory. The distributor holds stock between the first two handoffs. When they build ahead of a season, a promotion or a price increase, shipments run ahead of depletions. When they draw down, depletions run ahead of shipments. Over a year the two converge. Over any single month they don't.
Timing. A shipment is recorded when it is invoiced, a depletion when the distributor's order goes out and gets reported, a scan when the register rings. Reporting cadence differs by distributor, and depletion data lags the transaction by roughly a day or two. Month-end lands in a different place for each of the three.
Adjustments. Breakage, out-of-code returns, samples and transfers between a distributor's own branches all move cases without a matching sale to a retailer. Depending on how a transfer is coded, it can show as volume in one branch and a negative in another.
Units. Physical cases, standard case equivalents, 9-liter cases and eaches all get called "cases" by somebody. Draft is the usual culprit: converting a keg to case equivalents gives a different answer depending on which convention the system uses. Two correct reports can disagree purely on arithmetic.
Coverage. Scan data only exists for the retailers who share it. Independents, on-premise and non-reporting chains are not zero in that file — they are absent from it. That is the nature of how scan data is collected, not a defect in anyone's report.
A single-month variance between shipments and depletions is expected and rarely means anything. What is worth investigating is a variance that persists across a quarter or a year, where ordinary inventory swings should have washed out and haven't.
Which number belongs in which room
The habit worth building is not picking a favorite. It is picking the right one for the conversation you are actually in.
Account conversations: depletions. It is the only one of the three that names every account you sell to. Scan can name a store where a chain shares store-level detail; it never reaches the independents or the on-premise. A rep can act on "this bar took five cases a month for a year and took two last month". Nobody can act on a shipment total.
Production, forecast and revenue: shipments. It is what you invoiced and what you have to brew, import or bottle. It ties to your books. Forecasting production off depletions without allowing for distributor inventory is how you end up short in April and long in September.
Velocity and shelf performance: POS, where you have it. Depletions tell you a placement happened. Scan tells you whether it is moving — cases per store per week, whether a facing is earning its space. It is the sharpest of the three about the last handoff and the narrowest in coverage.
The difference in resolution is the whole point. We worked through one importer's depletion export recently: roughly thirty thousand rows, naming 13,109 individual accounts. No shipment total has that resolution, and no scan file covers those doors.
~30,000
rows in a single depletion export
13,109
individual accounts named in that one file
One names the account
Shipments tell you what left your building. Scan tells you what left a shelf. Only depletions tell you which bar bought — and, once you compare one period's list against the last, which one stopped. That is why every account-level conversation, with a rep or with a distributor, has to run on them.
When the gap is the story
Once each number is doing its own job, the distance between them becomes a read rather than a nuisance. Four patterns come up often enough to be worth naming.
Shipments up, depletions flat. Stock is building in the distributor's warehouse. Fine ahead of a season or a promotion. If it runs two or three periods, you have loaded the wholesaler and the sell-out has not followed — and a quiet order month is coming.
Depletions up, shipments flat. They are selling out of inventory. Either a restock order is imminent or you are heading for an out-of-stock in the market. Worth a call before you find out which.
Depletions steady, scan soft in the chains you can see. The placement is there and it is not moving. Look at price, position, and whether the account is doing anything with it at all.
Depletions steady, account count falling. The same volume coming from fewer doors. It reads as stability right up until one of the remaining accounts leaves.
The last one is the one that catches people out, because the headline number never moves. It is also not visible in any of the three reports on its own. It only appears when you compare the list of accounts in this period's file against the list in an earlier one. A transaction file, by its nature, lists the accounts that bought something: an account that bought nothing doesn't file a zero, it simply isn't there to count.
Say which one you're quoting
Most of the arguing disappears with a labeling habit. When you put a number in a deck, an email or a distributor review, say five things about it.
01Name the measure. "Depletions", "shipments" or "scan" — not "sales".
02Name the period, and say whether it is closed. "August through the 19th" is a different claim from "August final".
03Name the unit. Physical cases, standard cases, 9-liter or eaches — and hold to one unit per document.
04Name the source and the date you pulled it. Distributors restate, so two people pulling the same report a week apart get different numbers; the pull date explains that before anyone accuses anyone.
05If it is scan data, name the coverage. Which retailers, how many stores, off-premise only.
That is one line under a chart: "Depletions, standard cases, VIP pull June 19, closed periods through May." It ends the argument before it starts, and it makes the number reusable by whoever opens the deck six months from now.
The number we watch
Sightglass reads depletions, because the account-level question is the one a rep has to answer on Monday. It takes the VIP feed you already pay for, keeps every nightly snapshot so the history outlives any single export window, and compares each period's account list against the ones before it — which is where the fourth pattern above, steady volume from fewer doors, becomes something you can see. Accounts slipping, SKUs dropping off, accounts gone quiet: ranked, with the outreach drafted in your voice, to the account and to the distributor. A person approves every message, and approved mail sends from the rep's own mailbox so replies come back to them.
Your shipment reporting stays where it is. Your scan data stays where it is. This just means the depletions number gets read every night by something that is never too busy to line the files up.
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