Productized Engagement

TTB Compliance Autopilot

Cut your monthly TTB compliance work from 12 hours to under 2. A 6–10 week engagement that automates your Report of Wine Premises Operations (or DSP equivalent), excise tax returns, and COLA label pre-check — handed off to your ops team, not locked behind a platform.

Duration
6–10 weeks
Investment
$25K–$50K
Outcome
~85% time saved

Request a Scoping Call

Who this is for

Not every producer. This engagement pays back fastest for operations where compliance is a real monthly cost center — not a nuisance.

US-licensed wineries

Filing TTB Form 5120.17 (Report of Wine Premises Operations, the “BROP”) and Form 5000.24 excise tax returns. Producing 10,000+ cases is where the math typically clears.

US-licensed distilleries

Filing TTB Form 5110.40 (Monthly Report of Processing Operations) and associated DSP reports. Craft distillers past ~2,000 proof-gallon production a month.

Operations directors spending >8 hours/month on compliance

If your compliance manager has a second job (inventory, ops, HR) and TTB paperwork is always running late, the savings compound fast.

Single-point-of-failure risk

If the person who “knows compliance” is one person, and their departure would create a six-month training gap, you're running institutional risk the Autopilot resolves.

What's actually broken

We've mapped the TTB workflow across dozens of wineries and distilleries. The failure modes are remarkably consistent.

01

The BROP is assembled by hand, from four systems.

Production data lives in InnoVint or Vintrace. Inventory lives in your WMS or a spreadsheet. Tasting-room removals come from the POS. Bulk transfers are buried in email threads. Every month, someone walks through all of it and types totals into the TTB form. There is no technical reason this should still be manual in 2026.

02

Excise tax reconciliation eats a full day.

Proof gallons by brand and tax class, removals vs. returns, exemption tracking for exports and transfers in bond — it all has to balance against the BROP. A single miscategorized removal triggers hours of chasing.

03

COLA submissions are blind shots.

A new label goes to TTB, and you wait 30–60 days to find out if it's rejected for a formatting issue that could have been caught in five seconds. Rejection means starting over. An LLM-based pre-check catches 80%+ of preventable issues before the submit button.

04

The knowledge is in one person's head.

The tacit rules — which SKUs map to which tax class, how to handle blend returns, what counts as a “transfer in bond” — aren't written anywhere. When the compliance manager leaves, six months of your next hire's job is archaeology.

What you get

Every deliverable is yours at engagement end — source code, models, dashboards, and documentation. No platform lock-in.

Automated BROP generation

Reads directly from your production and inventory systems, generates a pre-filled TTB Form 5120.17 (or 5110.40 for DSPs) every month. Your compliance manager reviews and signs, rather than assembles from scratch.

Excise tax reconciliation

Computes proof gallons, tax class mapping, and removal categories from the same source data. Produces a review-ready F 5000.24 with full line-item traceability back to source transactions.

COLA label pre-flight

An LLM-powered label review that catches mandatory-statement issues, prohibited claims, class/type misalignment, and formatting problems before submission. Shortens COLA cycles from weeks of uncertainty to days of confidence.

Operations dashboard

A single pane of glass showing every number on every report, with one-click drill-down to source transactions. When TTB audits you — or when a new ops hire joins — the audit trail is the dashboard.

Compliance runbook

A written playbook for every monthly process, every edge case we encountered in your operation, and the team's role in each step. Your institutional knowledge, documented.

90-day warranty + training

Two onsite training sessions for your ops team, plus 90 days of post-launch support for any edge cases or regulatory updates that surface after we hand off.

Scope and timeline

6–10 weeks, depending on the complexity of your production stack and the historical data cleanup required.

Week 1
Kickoff & system audit. We inventory every system that touches compliance data. We read your last 12 months of filings. We meet the humans in the loop.
Weeks 2–3
Integration. We connect to InnoVint, Vintrace, Whiskey Systems, your POS, or whatever you actually use — via API where available, structured export where it isn't.
Weeks 4–6
Build. BROP generator, excise tax engine, COLA pre-check, and the dashboard. Built in your environment, not a hosted platform.
Weeks 7–8
Retro-validation. We run your last three months of reports through the Autopilot and reconcile against what you actually filed. Any delta is either a finding about our system or a finding about your prior filings.
Weeks 9–10
Go-live + handoff. First live month run end-to-end. Training sessions. Runbook delivery. 90-day warranty starts.

Pricing

Fixed-price, scoped in the kickoff call. No hourly billing, no time-and-materials surprises.

TTB Compliance Autopilot

$25K–$50Kone-time, fixed-price engagement

All design, build, integration, and testing

Retro-validation against your last 3 months of filings

Two onsite training sessions for your ops team

Compliance runbook — written specifically for your operation

90 days of post-launch support included

All source code and documentation transferred to you

Final price within the range depends on production-system complexity and historical-data cleanup. Scoped precisely in the kickoff call before any work begins.

What's not included

Legal interpretation of ambiguous TTB rules (keep your compliance counsel for that). Filing with TTB on your behalf — you sign and submit, we just prepare. State-level compliance and three-tier distribution reporting (separate scope if needed). Hardware, sensors, or physical-inventory rebuilds.

Optional ongoing retainer

After the 90-day warranty, most clients retain us at $2K–$5K/month for quarterly model updates, new-form responses when TTB changes something, and priority support. Not required; the Autopilot runs without it.

What to expect

Measured at the 90-day mark against your pre-engagement baseline.

~85%

Time saved

On monthly compliance workload, measured in actual human-hours of ops-team time.

3–5x

Faster COLA cycles

Fewer rejections, faster iteration, more new labels launched per quarter.

Zero

Single points of failure

The compliance process is documented, reproducible, and runnable by anyone with a login.

Frequently asked

Does this work with InnoVint / Vintrace / Whiskey Systems / our custom setup?

Yes. We integrate with any system that offers an API or structured export, and we've worked with all the major winery and distillery production platforms. During the kickoff audit we confirm the exact integration path and flag anything unusual before contracting.

What happens when TTB changes a form?

During the 90-day warranty, form updates are included. After that, they're covered by the optional retainer or billed as a short one-off engagement. TTB updates forms infrequently enough that most clients handle them via quarterly retainer.

How do you handle our proprietary data?

Our commitments are laid out in full on our Data Principles page. Short version: your data is never used to train models, is stored in US-only infrastructure, is deleted at engagement end, and is covered by a mutual NDA signed before any working session.

What if our production data is a mess?

Common, and built into the engagement. Week 1's system audit surfaces data quality issues and week 7's retro-validation catches the rest. If we uncover a fundamental data-integrity problem that requires more cleanup than scoped, we flag it early and either extend scope (with your approval) or narrow the Autopilot to what's cleanly automatable.

Do we still need our compliance manager after this?

Yes — but their job changes. Instead of assembling reports, they review generated reports, handle exceptions, and manage TTB audits and new-license work. Most clients redeploy that capacity into higher-leverage work; some reduce the role to part-time.

What about state-level compliance (3-tier, direct-to-consumer shipping)?

Separate scope. The data pipeline we build for TTB can feed state compliance too, and we often scope a follow-on engagement for state reporting once the TTB Autopilot is running. It's a much cleaner build on top of the foundation.

Ready to see the numbers on your operation?

A 30-minute scoping call is free. We'll look at your current compliance workflow, estimate your time savings, and give you a tight price within the range above.

Request a Scoping Call

Covered by a mutual NDA before any data is shared.