Industries
Wholesale and distribution
Distributors working on trade price lists, credit and multiple godowns, where receivables ageing matters as much as the sale.
What gets in the way
- Every customer has their own rate, and the sheet beside the till is the only record of it.
- Separate trade and retail price lists, per-customer rates, schemes and bonus quantities are held in the system and applied at billing.
- Goods go out on credit past the limit, and nobody notices until the month closes.
- Credit limits are enforced at the counter, with 30/60/90 ageing on receivables so an overdue account is visible before the next load leaves.
- A transfer between godowns is a phone call that both sides later remember differently.
- Transfers require confirmation at both ends before either stock position changes.
- You buy in cartons, move in packs and sell in pieces.
- Cartons, packs and pieces convert between each other, so the unit you count in is never the unit you are forced to bill in.
In practice
Who it is for, and what setup involves
What distribution asks of a system that retail does not
Three things. Prices that differ per customer rather than per item, so the same carton leaves at four different rates depending on who is buying. Credit that has to be enforced at the moment of billing rather than reviewed afterwards, because goods on a van are already gone. And stock in more than one place, which means transfers that both ends agree on.
Retail software that has grown a customer list is not the same as software built for this. The tell is usually whether a credit limit stops a sale or merely records that one happened.
Schemes, and why they belong in the ledger
Free goods and bonus quantities are how much of this trade actually competes, and they are frequently recorded as a discount because that is easier. It flatters your margin on the discounted line and understates your stock movement, so two reports disagree and neither is wrong.
Recording a scheme as stock issued keeps both honest. It also means you can answer what a scheme actually cost you, which is difficult to do afterwards from a discount column.
Ageing is the report that pays for the subscription
Thirty, sixty and ninety day bands on receivables, visible before the next load is loaded. Distributors rarely fail because of margin. They fail because of receivables that were visible for two months and not acted on.
What it costs
PKR 1,000 a month per branch or register. A distributor running a counter and two godowns is licensing the counters that bill, not the locations that hold stock.
Terms
Terms used on this page
Plain definitions of the words a buyer here actually searches for.
- Trade price
- The price offered to a reseller rather than an end customer, held as its own price list rather than applied as an ad-hoc discount.
- Bonus quantity
- Free goods given with a purchase, recorded as stock issued so it does not silently distort reported margin.
- Receivables ageing
- Grouping customer debt by how overdue it is, conventionally in 30, 60 and 90 day bands, so a deteriorating account is visible early.
- Credit limit
- The maximum a customer may owe, enforced at the point of billing rather than reviewed after the goods have left.
- Godown transfer
- A stock movement between locations that both ends confirm, so goods in transit are visible rather than missing from both.
Questions people ask before they buy
Twenty minutes, your own data, no slides.
Bring a month of your own sales, a payslip you argue about, or last term’s fee sheet. We will show you what it looks like in MjFour.