Ontario Brewery Sales to Licensees Transition to Brewery Sales to LCBO

This article outlines how to handle the transition of Brewery Sales to Licensees to Brewery Sales to LCBO in Brew Ninja

Beginning April 1, 2026, the LCBO became the exclusive wholesaler of beer to holders of a liquor consumption premises licence (e.g. bars and restaurants). Details on the change can be found here.

To ensure that LCBO sales appear on the correct line of the Ontario Schedule A reports in Brew Ninja, customer accounts for bars, restaurants etc. should be assigned to the LCBO Business Partner Category. This category exists in Brew Ninja by default, you do not need to create a new business partner category.

Recategorizing Individual Customers

1. Go to Transactions: Customers/Vendors.
2. Search for the customer you would like to recategorize and click the edit icon for that customer.
3. Go to the Classification tab.
4. From the Category drop down, select LCBO.
5. Click update to save your changes.

Recategorizing Customers in Bulk

1. Go to Reports: Customers and select the Customer Details Report.
2. Apply any relevant filters and export the report to excel or a CSV using the dropdown arrow beside the ‘Report’ button.
3. Open the exported file.
4. Go to Transactions: Customers/Vendors and select Import.
5. Click the hyperlink to download the Customer Import Template.
6. Open this file.
7. Copy all customer information from the Customer Details Report into relevant columns of the Customer Import file. Ensure that the headers in the Customer Import file remain unchanged.
8. Find or filter for all customers that are bars, restaurants etc.
9. Enter ‘LCBO’ into column J (Customer category) for all relevant customers and save your file.
10. In Brew Ninja, go to Transactions: Customers/Vendors: Import.
11. Click Import and select your saved file.
12. All edited customer records will be updated with the LCBO categorization selected. Any unedited customer records will remain the same.

NOTE: When importing your customer list with the categorization changes, Brew Ninja will match existing customer records to edited customer records based on name. It is important that you do not edit the names of your customers in the spreadsheet. If customer names in the spreadsheet do not match customer names in Brew Ninja, new customer records will be created upon import for any unrecognized customer names.

Ontario Schedule A

After you have recategorized your customers, sales to any customers with a category of LCBO will appear on Ontario Schedule A - Line 27. You can find this report via Reports: Taxes.