Orders arrive in one place, priced right, without rekeying
Orders that arrive by email, phone, text and a form all end up in the same place eventually — usually in somebody's head, then in a spreadsheet, then typed a second time into the invoice. Every one of those hops is a chance to lose a line or price it wrong.
What it looks like today
- Orders arrive four different ways and get consolidated by hand.
- Trade pricing lives in a separate sheet, and the current version is the one in the last email.
- The same order is typed once to pick it and again to bill it.
- A customer asks what they ordered last month and somebody goes looking.
What replaces it
- One queue, whatever door the order came in through.
- Each customer's own pricing applied as the order is entered, not remembered.
- The order becomes the picking list and the invoice without being retyped.
- Order history per customer, in front of whoever picks up the phone.
See what this would look like in your business.
Tell us how the work runs today. We'll show you where it leaks and what we would build first, at a fixed price. The first conversation costs nothing.
A price list that is actually the price list
In wholesale the pricing is the hard part, not the ordering. Different customers have different terms, some have a break at a quantity, some have a price agreed two years ago that nobody wants to revisit. When that lives in a spreadsheet, the version that gets used is whichever one is open. Putting it in the system means the price on the order is the agreed price by construction — and when it changes, it changes once.
The catalog nobody can order from
One distributor we looked at sends out a catalog as a PDF in which the PRICE and QTY columns are printed blank, to be filled in by hand and sent back. That is not a failure of effort; it is what happens when the catalog and the order system are different objects. When they are the same object, the customer sees what they can order at the price they pay, and the order arrives already priced.
Orders from more than one channel
An online kosher grocery distributor taking orders across several channels, a manufacturer shipping to fifty states, a dealer network placing orders against finishes and SKUs — these all have the same shape: several intake points, one fulfillment operation. The work is in making the intake points converge rather than in any one of them.
Questions
Questions about Order entry & quoting
Something else? Ask in the form below, or call (848) 285-5243.
What does custom order entry software do?
Custom order entry software gives every order one place to land, whether it arrives by phone, email, text or a web form. It prices each line from your real price list, including customer-specific pricing, commits the stock, and passes the order to billing so nothing is typed a second time.
Can customers place their own orders?
Yes, if you want them to. Trade customers can reorder from their own history and their own prices through a portal, and the order lands in the same queue as the ones your staff take by phone. Nothing changes for customers who would rather call.
Can it keep customer-specific prices and quotes?
Yes. Contract prices, volume breaks and one-off quotes are kept in the system and applied when the order is entered, and an accepted quote becomes an order without being retyped. The price on the invoice is the price that was agreed.
Related
Start a conversation
Tell us how your business runs. We'll show you what we'd build.
We'll look at how you work, show you where time and money leak, pick the first piece worth building, and show you what it would look like. A first conversation costs nothing. A real person replies within one business day.