One system for a wholesaler's orders, pre-orders, invoices and dispatch

The problem

Growing wholesalers often run this side of the business on spreadsheets and email. This business needed four hard things handled properly:

• Pre-orders. Selling stock before it arrives, taking a 20% deposit, then collecting the balance once it lands, for every customer.
• Who gets the stock. When a batch arrives and several customers are waiting, it has to go out fairly and in the right order.
• Three invoices per sale. A proforma, a deposit invoice and a VAT invoice on dispatch, each with correct VAT and matching numbering.
• Private financials. Cost prices and profit visible to the owners only, not to admin or warehouse staff.

What we built

An internal web system the whole team works in. Each person logs in and sees what they need to do next.

1. Orders and pre-orders in one flow. Create an order in three steps. If anything is short of stock it becomes a pre-order with a 20% deposit automatically, and stock is reserved the moment an order is confirmed.
2. Invoices that create and send themselves. A proforma on order, a deposit invoice on pre-order and a VAT invoice on dispatch, sent as PDFs from the client's own email address. Nobody builds an invoice by hand.
3. Fair, automatic stock allocation. When a new batch is added, it goes to waiting pre-orders strictly first come, first served, and each one converts to a live order once covered.
4. Work queues that tell staff what's next. The Balance Queue shows pre-orders ready for their balance invoice. The Fulfilment Queue shows paid orders ready to ship: enter a tracking number and the order, stock and VAT invoice are all finalised.
5. Owner-only profit. Revenue, profit and margin reports for the owners. Staff screens never receive those figures.

Screens

Screenshots use demo data.

Built to be relied on

• Stock is recorded as a ledger of every movement, so it can't quietly drift and you can always see where a unit went.
• Money is calculated in whole pence, so VAT and deposits never pick up rounding errors across the three invoices.
• Automated tests cover the money, stock and permission rules.
• It runs on the client's own accounts and was handed over with clear deploy and rollback steps, so they own it and aren't locked in.

Results

The system went live in September 2026 with the whole team on it. Since launch we've kept improving it based on day-to-day use; the first improvements shipped the day after go-live.

And because every sale, payment and stock movement is now recorded in one place, the business is building up a clean history it owns: the kind of data that reporting, and AI, can actually use.