Distribution
In distribution, margin isn’t lost somewhere visible. It’s lost in discounts nobody authorized, returns nobody costed and product that expired in the warehouse.
A distributor moves a lot of volume on thin margins. That means small errors, repeated thousands of times, eat up the profit — and late information is useless, because by the time it arrives the product has already been sold or has already expired.
Every salesperson using their own judgment. It’s solved with price lists by channel, margin limits and automatic approval when they’re crossed.
You buy by the pallet, store by the case and sell by the unit. If the conversions are wrong, inventory and cost are wrong.
Lot tracking with dates and first-expired, first-out picking, plus alerts with enough lead time to move the product.
The most underestimated line item. They have to be costed and charged to the order and the customer that generated them.
Cycle counts instead of a traumatic annual inventory, with adjustments that someone reviews and authorizes.
Limits per customer, shipment holds for past-due accounts, and authorized exceptions that stay on record.
Standard Odoo covers simple distribution well. What we’ve developed as proprietary modules, because in practice it’s needed: discount-policy control with margin-based approval, order-picking boards for warehouses with high line volume, credit control that holds invoicing for past-due customers, fiscal document numbering by branch, and direct thermal printing for dispatch and the sales counter.
All of that lives as proprietary modules, versioned and deployed through Git, separate from the core — so Odoo updates don’t break it.
The heavy lifting is in the data, not the software. In distribution, cleaning up the product catalog and units of measure before migrating is what decides whether the project finishes on time or drags on. Your team can do it, and it pays to start before you hire anyone.
Phase 1 with Sales, Inventory, Purchase, Accounting and electronic invoicing. After that, whatever hurts most: discount and margin control, routes and dispatch, or payroll. The full method is in how we implement Odoo, and you can estimate the investment range with the calculator.
Yes, with lot and expiration-date tracking and first-expired, first-out removal rules. What needs careful design is the physical warehouse process: the lot in the system is useless if, on the floor, people ship whatever is closest at hand. The implementation has to reach that far, not stop at the screen.
With pricing policies by channel and by customer, and automatic approvals when the discount or the margin crosses a limit. It’s one of the areas where we’ve built the most proprietary modules, because the standard product covers the simple case and distributors rarely have the simple case.
Yes, and it’s the main reason a distributor changes systems. It requires costs to be tracked properly and associated expenses — freight, returns, credit notes, free-goods allowances — to be charged to the order rather than diluted into a general expense at month-end.
Yes: dispatch planning by route, delivery documents, proof of receipt and handling of what comes back. Returns are the most underestimated point — with perishables they can move the margin several points, and they’re almost always recorded late and wrong.
Between 12 and 20 weeks for a phase 1 with Sales, Inventory, Purchase, Accounting and electronic invoicing. Where you land in that range depends on the state of the product catalog and the units of measure, which in distribution is usually the heaviest work in the entire migration.
A 30-minute conversation is enough to know whether Odoo, automation or an integration solves your problem — and what it would cost to do it right.