A distributor's day has two moments that matter: the morning, when the van leaves the depot, and the evening, when the money comes back. Nearly every problem is born in between — the case missing at the customer's, the order delivered twice, the cash that does not add up. And most of them come from the organisation, not the people.
Pre-selling or van sales: two ways to run a round
In van sales, the salesperson loads an estimated quantity in the morning, sells what each customer takes and comes back with the rest. It is simple, but the load is a bet: too much and you drive stock around all day; too little and you lose sales at the fifteenth customer.
In pre-selling, the salesperson visits first and takes the order, and delivery follows — the next day, often by someone else. The van leaves with exactly what was ordered. The price is two visits and a delay the customer has to accept.
Many do both: pre-selling for regular grocers, van sales for small outlets. What matters is that each customer knows which way they are served.
Taking the order before the goods
In pre-selling, an order is a promise, not a sale. Counting it as one drops the stock while the cases are still in the depot, and charges the customer before they receive anything. At the first change, two places need correcting — and one is always forgotten.
The rule fits in one sentence: an order touches neither the stock nor the customer's balance until it is delivered. That is how orders work in Gestio: the salesperson enters it on their phone with the customer, the lines, the expected date and, if the customer pays a deposit, the amount. Stock only goes out on delivery.
- Quantities in the unit you load. "Ten cases", not "the usual".
- The deposit, written down at once. The 500 dirhams handed to the salesperson must exist somewhere other than their pocket.
From a batch of orders to a loading sheet
Take an ordinary evening: forty orders from four salespeople. Preparing them one by one means crossing the depot forty times. The loading sheet adds the orders up by product: instead of twelve scattered lines of 5-litre oil, one total.
In Gestio, the storekeeper ticks the orders to load together — one salesperson's, or all of the day's. The loading sheet shows, for each product, the quantity to load, what is in stock and what is missing, and prints for the loader. Once the goods are out, conversion creates one delivery note per order in a single step, and that is when stock goes down.
It goes all the faster when every product has a fixed place in the depot.
A shortage found at the depot costs a phone call. Found at the customer's, it costs the customer.
Partial deliveries and back orders
The customer ordered ten cases and six are left. Delivering six and closing the order forgets the other four; waiting until you have ten sends the customer elsewhere.
Good practice is to deliver what you have and leave the rest open. In Gestio, a partial delivery keeps the order open for the remainder; at the next preparation it is marked "Partial" and only counts what is still to load.
Review back orders every morning, before the new ones. A back order that lingers deserves a call to the customer, not silence.
Collecting on the round, handing in at night
A salesperson who collects comes back with money, and that money must match specific deliveries. In Gestio, they declare a cash hand-in by ticking the cash collections they are handing over; the manager counts, enters the real amount, and a different amount is flagged as a discrepancy. By evening you know who still holds cash.
The indicators of a round that works
None has a universally right value; watch how they move week to week, salesperson by salesperson.
- Delivered against ordered, and the age of back orders. Two days late is logistics; two weeks is a customer you are losing.
- Shortages on the loading sheet. If they keep hitting the same products, the problem is upstream: a badly set reorder point.
- Cash still in hand at night. It should come back to zero every day, not every week.
- Customers visited without an order. Twenty-five visits for ten orders is not the same job as twenty-five for twenty.
These functions — orders, loading sheet, partial delivery, hand-ins per salesperson — are what make up Gestio for distributors, on the salesperson's phone as on the depot's computer.