Free tool
What Does One Club Box Really Leave You
Enter your own wine cost, packaging, freight, and reship rate to see the true cost of a club box and the margin left underneath it.
Free tool, no sign up
How Many Packing Days Will This Club Run Take
Put in your member count, hold rate, and line staffing to see the boxes, the hours, and the days your next club run needs.
Club runs get scheduled by memory, which is why they run long. Someone remembers the spring shipment taking two days, forgets that the hold rate was lower and that two extra people were on the floor, and books the carrier pickup for a day that never had a chance. The result is a Friday afternoon spent taping boxes with a driver waiting.
This planner works forward from the numbers you can check before the run: who is actually shipping after holds and skips, how fast your line moves per person, how many real hours you get on the floor once setup and the carrier cutoff are taken out, and how many boxes will need hands on attention because of an address, a substitution, or a compliance hold.
Your result
Boxes to pack this run
546
Members left once holds, skips, and failed cards come off the list.
Hours on the packing line
7.0
Total floor hours at your steady packing rate with everyone working.
Packing days needed
2
Rounded up, because a run that spills over an hour still eats another day.
Boxes needing hands on work
33
The exception cart that quietly grows while the rest of the line moves.
Book your carrier pickup against the packing days figure, then add a day of slack for the exception cart before the last manifest.
Why the hold rate decides your week
The hold and skip rate is the single input that moves a run the most, and it is the one most wineries guess at. A club that runs eight percent holds in spring can hit twenty in July once heat holds and vacation skips land together, and that swing is the difference between a two day run and a four day one.
The rate is also a signal worth watching on its own. Rising skips before a run usually means the wine selection was announced late or the member choice window was too short. Rising failed cards usually means nobody worked the expiring card list in the two weeks before billing. Both show up here as fewer boxes, but both cost you revenue rather than saving you time.
Staffing the line without stalling it
Adding people to a packing line stops helping sooner than most owners expect. Wine has to be staged, boxes have to be built, labels have to keep up, and one printer or one staging table is often the real constraint. If your rate per person drops when you add a fourth packer, the bottleneck is somewhere other than hands.
The exception boxes need separate handling. Pulling them into their own cart with one person assigned keeps the main line moving at a steady rate, while working them inline drags everyone down. Use the exception figure above to decide whether that is a corner of the table or a person for the whole run.
Questions about this calculator
What is a realistic packing rate per person?
Small winery lines commonly land between twenty and thirty five boxes an hour per person for a three bottle shipment, once the wine is staged and the labels are printing. Six bottle boxes run slower. Time one hour of your next run and use that number instead of ours.
Should I count the person printing labels as a packer?
No. Count only the people putting bottles into boxes. Label printing, manifest handling, and working the exception cart are real jobs, but they do not add to the packing rate and counting them will make the run look shorter than it is.
How do I plan a run that crosses a weekend?
Do not let it. Boxes that sit in a trailer or on a dock over a weekend are the classic source of cooked wine, especially in summer. If the days figure pushes you past Wednesday, either add people, split the run into two ship weeks, or move the ship date.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Club Run Sheet: One Page Per Shipment
A fill in working sheet you complete once per club run, so the whole shipment lives on one page instead of four spreadsheets and somebody's memory.
The figure only helps if the next run starts from it
You have a number for this shipment. The harder part is making sure the next one begins there instead of from memory, with the same wine lineup, hold requests and destination states feeding the math. A demo takes about thirty minutes and we use your members, not our defaults.