Challenge
A wholesale importer and distributor needed to move beyond a legacy desktop ERP that staff had used for years. Purchasing, receiving, inventory, sales documents and customer-specific pricing all belong to the same business, but each department has its own work to manage. The replacement also needed to work with warehouse inventory held by a third-party logistics provider.
Historical records came from CSV exports. Inventory needed lot-level detail and support for FIFO or average landed-cost methods. Staff also needed a place to record receiving discrepancies, product compliance information, samples and the activity behind important changes. Replacing the old system meant connecting purchasing through receiving and stock allocation, then carrying the right information into proposals, orders, invoices and credit notes.
What we built
We built a browser-based ERP for purchasing, receiving, inventory and sales. Purchasing includes purchase orders, vendor offers and vendor bills. Receiving teams can log discrepancies and use per-container cost baselines for landed cost. Inventory is organized into lots with FIFO and average landed-cost methods, and sales teams can allocate both available and incoming stock.
Sales staff can prepare proposals, orders, invoices and credit notes with customer-specific pricing and closeout rules. The portal also includes compliance records, product samples, PDF and Excel documents, sales blasts and an activity log. Department dashboards group the work, and every statistic links to its underlying view. Buyers can enter the B2B portal through magic-link login.
A connection imports inventory snapshots from the third-party warehouse management system. That gives the distributor a view of stock held outside its own facilities alongside purchasing, receiving and sales records in the portal.
How we worked
We built iteratively through department-by-department calls with purchasing, sales, accounting and logistics. Those conversations shaped the workflows each group uses, from vendor offers and bills through receiving, landed cost, stock allocation and customer documents. We migrated historical records from CSV exports and organized the rollout department by department.
We treated lot detail, landed-cost methods, incoming stock allocation and discrepancy reporting as working business rules. Product compliance records, samples, documents and the activity log support the operational work around each sale. The warehouse snapshot connection brings third-party stock into the same day-to-day view without replacing the warehouse system.
Teams can use the activity log to follow changes and dashboards to move from a summary into the underlying view, keeping day-to-day decisions connected to the source records.
Result
Staff can work through purchasing, receiving, lot-based inventory and sales in one portal, using customer pricing, incoming-stock allocation, compliance records and documents as part of the same process. Buyers have magic-link access, and logistics can review third-party warehouse inventory snapshots. Historical records have moved from CSV, and teams are rolling into the replacement department by department.
Next phase: QuickBooks sync and container tracking.