Solutions · Distribution & wholesale
The rates are the hard part. The rest is paperwork.
Price lists, orders, dispatch, godowns and billing for a distributor or wholesaler. A wholesale office is not difficult to move onto a system. Orders, dispatch, bills and godowns all go in the way you would expect them to. What does not go in easily is the one thing the business actually runs on — what this customer pays, which is not what the last caller pays, and which has never been written down in one place.
The order it goes in
Why the rates come before the customers
This sequence is not obvious, and it is not a shop’s. A rate belongs to a list, so the lists are settled first. Enter them the other way round and every customer’s rate is argued all over again.
The goods, and the units they are sold in
One catalogue, carrying the unit each thing is really sold in and the attributes it varies by. A trade that sells the same item by the piece and by the case settles that here, once.
Until this is in, there is nothing for a rate to be a rate of.
The rates, as lists
Not a rate per customer. A set of lists that between them describe every rate you actually give, with the genuine exceptions as lists of their own.
This is the work, and it is the only part of the move nobody can do for you.
The customers, entered once
Now a customer is entered once and is finished. A quotation starts from the Retail list, and a line’s rate is changed to the list you agreed with them rather than remembered by whoever answers the phone.
Until this is in, there is nobody to address a quotation to.
The godowns, and what is in each
Stock per item and per variant, in the godown it is actually in, every movement written as a document — and batches where your trade has to be able to say which one a thing came out of.
Until this is in, a load can be promised out of a godown that does not have it.
Who is allowed to open what
On a business whose margin is a figure on a list, this is not administration. Roles decide who can open the price lists at all, and a branch only ever sees its own records.
Worth settling before the first person outside the family is given a login.
One day, and where it lands
The day the phone rings, drawn
A wholesale day is a mesh rather than a line — most of what happens lands on more than one record at once, which is precisely why the same day kept in separate books never quite agrees with itself.
The godown is on that drawing, and it is the one people leave off. A load leaving is recorded against the order with the godown it went from; the stock figure itself changes only by a document on its own screens.
What we would leave switched off
The parts a wholesaler is sold and never opens
The move has one subject and it is the rate. Anything that is not that is worth leaving off until the office is running, and none of it is what is going wrong today.
- Projects
- Nothing you sell is delivered over weeks. A load leaves and the job is finished; tasks, deliverables and sign-offs would be screens nobody opens.
- Payroll
- Wages are not what is broken. Leaving the staff side off keeps the move to one subject, and an office learning one thing at a time is an office that learns it.
- What staff do themselves
- Your queue is not staff asking for payslips. It is customers asking for a rate and asking where their material has got to — and both of those are answered by what is switched on.
Each is a switch, thrown when the business asks for it rather than when a page like this does.
The part nobody can do for you
The rates that live in somebody’s head
There is no file to bring these in from. They are not written down anywhere — which is exactly why the business cannot answer a rate question without one particular person in the room.
A price list is a set of rates held against your catalogue. Most wholesalers who believe they have a rate per customer turn out to have a small number of lists and a short tail of genuine exceptions.
So the work is not typing. It is an afternoon of grouping the customers you have into the rates you actually give, and being honest about which of them are exceptions rather than policy. The exception is not a problem: somebody genuinely on their own terms gets a list of their own.
What causes the trouble is the customer nobody can remember agreeing anything with. Finding out who those are is, by itself, worth the afternoon — and it is the one part of this that happens in a room with your people rather than on a screen.
What a wholesaler asks first
Three questions we are asked on every distribution call
Each of these sounds like a detail and is actually a decision about how the office will work for years.
- Somebody sends a list on WhatsApp and calls it an order. What is it?
- Something to quote. Your office makes the quotation for that customer directly, with the rates on it, and takes the order when they accept — and a list a customer builds on your website arrives as a request to price rather than in a mailbox somebody has to remember to check.
- Is a godown the same thing as a branch?
- No, and mixing them up is expensive. A godown is where stock physically is: held per item and per variant in each, with a movement between them written down. A branch is a piece of the business with its own profile, its own branding and its own legal details, and it only ever sees its own records. Plenty of wholesalers have several godowns and one branch.
- We sell the same thing by the piece and by the case.
- That is the unit, and it belongs to the item rather than to the sale. An item carries the unit it is sold in and the attributes you let it vary by, so where that split goes is decided while the catalogue is being built — which is a much cheaper place to decide it than afterwards.
What your website is allowed to see
A wholesale site takes a request, not a sale
This is the real difference between a shop’s site and yours, and it is a decision rather than a limitation. Each kind of record is switched on or off on its own, on a key you issue and tied to the branch you issue it for.
What you would open
- Your catalogue — so a customer can see what you carry without ringing to ask what you carry.
- Live stock — so “do you have it” is answered on a page instead of by somebody walking to a godown.
- Requests to price — a list a customer builds on the site arrives as something for your office to rate, against the customer it came from.
What stays shut
- The checkout — a shop opens this and should. A wholesaler mostly should not — completing a sale means naming a rate, and your rates are the business.
- Your customer records and your bills — nothing about who owes what is reachable because a page wanted to show a product.
The point is not that a wholesale site can do less. It is that the thing a wholesale site should do — hand your office a request from a customer who is already yours, for your office to price — is exactly what it is allowed to do, and the rest was never opened.
Bring us your rate sheet.
Whatever form it is in: a book, a spreadsheet, or one person’s memory. We will tell you what it looks like as lists, what we would switch on for the first month, and what we would leave alone until the office has stopped arguing about prices.
Every trade, side by side →Parts of the office →What it does →Plans & pricing →