Wholesale & Distribution
A distributor makes a few points of margin on volume, extends credit to customers who pay late, and holds stock across depots in numbers that drift from reality between counts. The back office carrying all three is usually smaller than it should be. This page is which of those desks has a live agent reporting to it today, and which of them does not.
5 of the 7 back-office roles below have a live agent reporting to them today. The rest are listed because they exist in this business, not because we cover them.
High invoice volume, often hundreds a week, matched against purchase orders and goods received notes by hand or not at all.
Finance Operations holds wrongly taxed, duplicated and unmatched bills before the payment run with the evidence attached, and drafts the supplier query. At this volume it is the difference between checking a sample and checking all of them.
Customer payments arrive as lump sums against several invoices, and applying them correctly is a daily job done from a bank statement.
Revenue & Cash Assurance ties receipts and settlement lines to the ledger daily and names what does not match, instead of leaving it to build up until the close.
Each depot holds its own stock and its own view of it. Replenishment is set per depot, so the same item is short in one and dead in another.
Supply & Inventory Operations drafts purchase orders with days of cover attached, proposes a transfer between depots before a second purchase, and flags duplicate and malformed product records that make both numbers wrong.
Margin by product line and by customer is the question the business runs on, and it is answered from a spreadsheet two weeks after the fact.
Management Accounting & Close puts the close blockers on the desk on day one, lists the accruals, explains what moved in cost of sales, and drafts the management pack for a person to sign.
Warehouse and driving staff, often with licences and permits that expire, tracked in files updated when someone remembers.
HR & Payroll Operations catches expiring permits, duplicate bank accounts and missing contracts before the payroll run rather than after a fine or a failed payment.
Trade accounts are chased by the person who has the relationship. Ageing is a report that gets read, not a queue that gets worked.
No agent covers this yet. A person still does all of it.
Volume rebates and supplier funding are tracked in a spreadsheet and claimed from memory at the end of the agreement period.
No agent covers this yet. A person still does all of it.
Distribution runs on two numbers that are both slightly wrong: what you are owed and what you are holding. Receivables age because chasing is nobody specific job. Stock drifts because it is counted in depots on different days by different people. Everything downstream, including the margin figure the business is steered by, inherits both errors.
On a few points of margin, a supplier invoice paid at the wrong price is not a rounding error, it is the month. A rebate not claimed inside the agreement period is gone. A customer who pays at ninety days instead of thirty is financing their business with yours. And a stock figure that is wrong at the depot level produces a purchase order that should never have been raised.
All five live agents apply, but be clear about what is missing: the two desks a distributor would most want covered, credit control and rebates, are not built. What is covered is the payables, cash, stock, close and payroll work underneath them.
Keeps stock available without over-buying, catches purchasing problems early, and protects gross margin.
What it does →Prevents avoidable payments, catches invoice and VAT errors before the payment run, and keeps cash and the audit trail visible.
What it does →Checks that what the tills recorded, what the bank received and what the ledger posted agree, and hands you every place they do not.
What it does →Finds everything standing between today and a closed month on day one, instead of one thing at a time across a week.
What it does →Catches what is wrong in an employee's file, documents or payment details before a regulator, a bank or an unpaid employee makes it obvious.
What it does →Every agent runs the same code for every business. What changes is what your connected systems contain, and that decides what an agent finds.
The run starts with the bills, because there are the most of them. Two hundred and forty supplier invoices from the week are matched against purchase orders and receipts; nine are held. Two are duplicates submitted under different invoice numbers, four are priced above the agreed list, two have a tax treatment that does not match the supplier registration, and one bills a quantity larger than what was received. Bank lines are tied to the ledger and six receipts cannot be matched to an open invoice, which is the start of a cash application queue rather than the end of one. Across three depots, the product records are scanned and eleven duplicates are found, which had split the cover figure for each; two of the resulting reorders are replaced with transfers. Two driving licences expire inside the month. Every one of those is drafted, evidenced, and waiting for a person to approve it. Nothing was paid, posted or released.
Nothing in that run executes on its own. Each drafted action waits in the approvals queue for a person on your team, and above a set amount the owner has to sign.
Need one of these first? Tell us.
Three minutes, no card, no account. You get a verdict for that role, a task map with a reason per task, and the matching live agent if there is one.