Field notes · Three-tier basics

Why you can't see your own customers

By the Sightglass team6 min read12 June 2026

In most of the United States, the bar that pours your beer is not your customer. Your customer is the distributor. You invoice the distributor; the distributor invoices the account. That one structural fact explains most of what feels odd about the data that comes back to you — why it arrives second-hand, why it stops at the account door, and why there is so rarely a person's name attached to an account.

What follows is a general description of a common arrangement, not legal advice. Alcohol is regulated state by state, and the details differ enough that two neighboring states can run on genuinely different rules. But the broad shape holds nearly everywhere — and the shape of the rules turns out to be the shape of your reporting.

The three tiers, briefly

After Prohibition ended, most states rebuilt the alcohol trade as three separated layers and wrote tied-house rules to keep them apart, so that no single party could own the chain from production to pour. Whatever you think of it as policy, it is the ground you sell on.

Tier one — the supplier. The brewery, winery, distillery, cidery, or importer that makes or brings in the product and owns the brand.
Tier two — the distributor. The licensed wholesaler who buys the product, warehouses it, and carries it to retail. In control states the state itself takes on part of this function, more often for spirits than for beer.
Tier three — the retail account. The bar, restaurant, bottle shop, grocery chain, or stadium that sells to the person drinking it — 21 and over.

In most states a supplier cannot sell directly into tier three. There are well-known exceptions: small producers with self-distribution privileges up to a volume cap, a producer's own taproom or tasting room, and direct-shipping regimes that in some states cover wine far more broadly than beer. Franchise statutes in many states also govern the supplier–distributor appointment itself, sometimes making it much harder to end than to begin. Which of those apply to you depends entirely on where you are.

Every sentence above has an exception somewhere. Treat this as orientation, not compliance guidance — your counsel and your state's regulator are the authority on what you may and may not do.

You don't own the transaction

The practical consequence is simple. The transaction of record is supplier to distributor. A case leaves your warehouse against a distributor's purchase order, and everything that happens after that — which account took it, how many, which SKU, in what week — happens on somebody else's books. A depletion report is the middle tier telling you, after the fact, what left their warehouse and where it went.

That is why the word is depletion. It is inventory depleting out of tier two, not a sale you made. It also means you effectively keep two customer lists that people talk about as if they were one: the distributors you actually sell to, and the accounts you are sold into. You have a contract with the first list. You have a reported record of the second.

The practical version
You are reading a record of shipments, not a record of relationships. Everything you actually want to know — is this account still with us, is the staff still pouring it, did we quietly lose the handle — has to be inferred from case movement. That inference is possible and it is worth doing. It is still inference.

What arrives, and what doesn't

Once you accept that the account relationship is reported to you rather than owned by you, the contents of the file stop being surprising.

Account-level movement: yes. The account, the SKU, the cases, the period. That spine is genuinely good, and it is the whole basis of everything below.
Consumer-level detail: no. Nothing in a depletion feed tells you what got poured on a Friday, what sat in the walk-in, or who ordered it. The transaction that would carry that detail happens two tiers away from you.
Timing: the distributor's reporting cadence. In practice a day or two behind. That is fine for trend, and not something to treat as live.
Contact data: usually thin. Accounts arrive as license numbers, names, and addresses, because that is what a transaction needs to settle. The buyer's name, the beverage director who actually decides — that lives in your reps' heads, not in the file.
Absence: not reported at all. An account that stops ordering doesn't file a zero. It stops appearing. A transaction file records transactions, and a non-transaction leaves nothing to record.

There is one more thing the structure does to you, and it is easy to miss. The distributor's own rep may be inside that account every week while yours gets there quarterly. Some of what you know about tier three is really what tier two knows about tier three. That is a constraint, and it is also the reason a distributor relationship is worth every bit as much as an account relationship.

Which is why the file is worth reading carefully

None of this makes the reporting less valuable. It makes it more so. For most suppliers, the depletion feed is the only systematic view of tier three they will ever have — the single place where thousands of accounts they cannot sell to directly show up in one list. It deserves better than a skim.

Keep every export. No single file reaches back far enough to show a pattern. The archive is what makes comparison possible.
Normalize account identity before comparing anything. The same bar can arrive under different names and spellings from different distributors.
Treat absence as a signal, not a gap. Last period's account list minus this period's is a list nobody has by default.
Weight by what an account used to take. A quiet twenty-case account matters more than a loud two-case one, and percentage drops flatter the small.
Build the contact layer yourself. The file won't hand it to you. Your reps and your distributor partners will.

It is worth knowing what that reading turns up. We ran the comparison across one importer's own exports — roughly 30,000 rows in a single file:

13,109
accounts listed in the export
5,085
accounts absent from the file entirely — no zero row
80,932
cases those absent accounts took the prior year

Those accounts were not hidden. They were simply not there, which is what a transaction file does with a non-transaction. Nobody had done anything wrong. Lining up export after export side by side is a day's work that never reaches the top of anyone's Monday.

Or have it read every night

Sightglass reads the VIP depletion feed you already pay for and keeps every snapshot, so your history outlives any single export window. It looks for accounts going quiet and accounts that are winning, and hands each rep a short ranked list — in Slack, in an email digest, or on the dashboard — with the outreach drafted both to the account and to the distributor. Nothing sends without a person approving it, and approved mail goes from the rep's own mailbox, so replies come back to them. Your reporting stays exactly where it is.

Depletion data lags a day or two, and we build around that rather than pretend otherwise. Where the data can't yet support a conclusion, the system says nothing instead of guessing — so a flag means something when you see one.
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