Wholesale & Distribution

Where a trading company’s margin actually goes

A distributor rarely loses a deal on price. It loses the margin afterwards: in the fourth discount nobody netted off, in the customer who took ninety days on thirty-day terms, and in the load that went out without a signature and came back as a claim. What those three leaks have in common is that they all happen on documents the system is already producing. A general ERP records each of them and connects none of them, which is why the answer to “what did we make on that container” arrives weeks late and by spreadsheet. Nama has no distribution add-on. It has the discount stack, the credit ceiling and the delivery record as fields on the ordinary sales cycle every customer runs.

List price, minus four things

A document line in Nama carries up to eight separate discounts, and the document carries one more at the header. Eight sounds excessive until you price a real trade — list, minus trade, minus volume, minus the seasonal promotion, minus settlement — each negotiated with a different person and each needing to appear on the invoice in its own right. What decides whether they compound or simply add is set once per slot, and it is worth deciding rather than inheriting: two ten per cent discounts calculated on the total price take twenty off, and the same two calculated one after the other take nineteen.

The price they come off is resolved rather than typed. A sales price list carries a priority, a validity window with an optional time of day, a currency, and a target — a named customer, a customer class, a category — and its lines carry quantity tiers, so the same item prices differently at one pallet and at ten. A minimum price on the line is a floor the salesman cannot go under, and where you would rather price from cost than maintain a list, a chain of updaters builds the selling price out of the item’s cost or its last sales price, with your own rounding, across a filtered range in one action.

Credit is the second inventory

The stock in the warehouse is money you have already spent; the balance on the customer’s account is money you have already earned and not yet seen. Nama treats the second as seriously as the first. Receivables hold the credit limit as a table, so a customer can carry a different ceiling in each company or branch, and debt ages are the mechanism that matches a receipt to the invoices it pays — which is what turns a balance into an age rather than a total. An invoice and its own credit note net against each other instead of sitting on the screen as two open items, a cut-off date keeps years of migrated history off it, and where the accounting team insists on allocating every receipt itself, automatic matching can be switched off entirely. For money collected away from the office there is an electronic receipt voucher on a phone: the collecting employee, the amount, cash or cheque, both signatures, and the invoices it settles.

Getting it there, and proving you did

The last stage is the one that generates the arguments. Picking is governed by rules rather than habit — oldest first, nearest expiry first, nearest location, or a named lot — and the pick list walks the warehouse in order instead of sending the picker back down the same aisle twice. A loading document consolidates several deliveries into one truck by route, driver or vehicle, and holds them in a state that is neither ordinary stock nor delivered: reserved against the shipment, still yours, already off the shelf. The delivery document is the proof of receipt — status per line, the driver and vehicle that carried it, and an optional confirmation code from the customer — and when a delivery fails, a cancellation reverses it and returns the goods to available stock. A delivery queue assigns loads by zone and priority against driver profiles that record which vehicle types and which zones each driver is cleared for, refrigerated transport among them. Inventory is what all of it moves, and it posts to the same general ledger as everything else.