Every distilled spirits plant in the United States files the same handful of forms, on the same cadence, forever. The work is rarely hard. It is just unforgiving: the numbers have to tie out, the deadlines do not move, and the source data usually lives in three places that disagree.
Here is what is actually due, where it tends to break, and what "good" looks like.
The four filings
A DSP files three operational reports each month and an excise tax return twice a month:
- Report of Storage Operations (TTB F 5110.11) covers spirits held in bonded storage: what went into a tank or barrel, what came out, and what is on hand at month end, measured in proof gallons.
- Report of Production Operations (TTB F 5110.40) covers what you distilled: materials used, spirits produced, and the kinds and proof of what came off the still.
- Report of Processing Operations (TTB F 5110.28) covers dumping, blending, bottling, and finishing.
- The excise tax return (TTB F 5000.24) reports tax on spirits removed from bond for the period and is filed semi-monthly.
None of these is conceptually difficult. The difficulty is that each one is a different cut of the same underlying activity, and every cut has to reconcile to the others and to your physical inventory.
Where it goes wrong
Three failure modes account for most of the pain:
- Proof gallon math drift. A proof gallon is one liquid gallon at 100 proof. If your wine-gallon-to-proof-gallon conversions are done by hand, or rounded inconsistently between systems, your storage report will not foot and you will spend the deadline hunting a few tenths of a gallon.
- Activity that never made it into the ledger. A barrel got dumped, a tank got gauged, a sample got pulled, and the paperwork lagged. The report is only as complete as the events someone remembered to record.
- Reconciling across silos. Production lives in one spreadsheet, the bond in another, removals in the accounting system. Reconciliation becomes a manual merge every month.
What good looks like
The filing should be a review, not a reconstruction. That happens when three things are true:
- Every barrel fill, movement, gauge, dump, and removal is captured as it happens, with proof and volume attached.
- Proof gallon conversions use one audited formula everywhere, to a fixed precision, so the same event produces the same number on every report.
- The reports are generated from that activity, not re-keyed from it, so storage, production, processing, and the excise return are all reading from a single source.
When the data is clean and the math is centralized, the three operational reports and the excise return populate themselves. Your job shrinks to reading them, confirming they match the floor, and submitting.
This is exactly how Spirit Sight approaches TTB: the forms are built from the activity already in the system, with proof gallon math handled to a fixed precision in one place. Filing becomes a review.
This article is general information about TTB operational reporting, not tax or legal advice. Confirm your obligations with TTB guidance and your own compliance team.