Your systems already know. None of them knows together.
Every wholesaler asks this before the second call, and most ask it privately, which means it usually gets answered wrongly. Here is the honest version. Your EPOS, your accounts package and your stock system each keep a complete and accurate history of their own half of the business. The commercial questions that cost you money are the ones whose answer lives in two of those histories at once, and in a supplier agreement that is not in any of them.
FIRST, THE FAIR VERSION
These are good systems doing the job they were built for
This page is not an argument that your software is bad. Most of it is better than the use anybody gets out of it, and a mature inventory platform will do replenishment, lead times and multi-location analytics properly, with its working shown. If you are running one of those well, you are ahead of most of this trade.
Nothing below says a named product cannot do something. Every statement here is about where a piece of data physically lives in a typical independent wholesaler, which is a fact you can check against your own screens in ten minutes, rather than a claim about a vendor's capability that would need arguing about.
WHAT EACH ONE HOLDS
Four histories, kept in four places
The columns matter more than the rows. Each system records its own half completely, and the second column is not a criticism: it is simply the data that was never entered there, because there was never a reason to.
| The system | What it records, completely | What it is not the system holding |
|---|---|---|
| Your EPOS or till | Every line that sold, at what price, on what day, to which account where you capture that. | What you paid for it, what your supplier agreed to rebate on it, or how long that account takes to settle. |
| Your accounts package | Every invoice raised and received, every payment, and when each one was posted. | What is physically on the shelf today, at what landed cost, against which lead time and which target cover. |
| Your stock system | What should be on the shelf, what moved, and what was counted. | The terms you agreed with the supplier, or the payment behaviour of the accounts you sell to. |
| Your supplier agreements | The volume tiers, the retrospective discounts, and the conditions attached to each. | Anything at all, in most businesses. They are a signed PDF in an inbox or a folder, not a table anything can query. |
WHERE THE MONEY IS
Three questions, none answerable from one system
These are not reports that somebody forgot to run. Each one is a join between two histories that live in different places, plus a term that lives in a document. That is why they get done once a year, in a spreadsheet, by whoever has a quiet week.
Did we cross a rebate tier and never get credited?
- What it needs
- Purchase volumes over a period, from the purchase ledger. The tier and its conditions, from the agreement. The credit notes actually received, from the same ledger.
- Why it is a join
- Two of those three are in your accounts package and one is in a PDF. Nothing reconciles the PDF against the ledger unless a person does it, and the amount is usually too small to notice per invoice and large enough to matter per year.
Which lines are holding cash we could use?
- What it needs
- Units on hand, from the stock system. Sales velocity, from the EPOS or the sales ledger. Lead time and the target cover you set, from your own judgement. Landed cost, including duty and carriage, from the purchase side.
- Why it is a join
- Four inputs from three places, and the one that decides the answer, target cover, is a number you set rather than a number any system holds. Get it from the wrong place and the figure is confidently wrong.
Which accounts are slipping before they go overdue?
- What it needs
- Invoice dates and settlement dates over time, from the accounts package. What each account used to buy and how often, from the sales history.
- Why it is a join
- An aged debtor report tells you who is late today. It does not tell you who is taking eleven days longer than they did six months ago while still technically inside terms, which is the signal that arrives early enough to act on.
WHY IT DOES NOT GET DONE
It is reconciliation work, not a missing button
Every one of those three can be done by hand. People do them: usually once, usually in a spreadsheet, usually after somebody notices a number that looks wrong. The work is exporting three files, matching product codes that do not agree across systems, reading an agreement, and doing arithmetic that has to be right. It takes a competent person the better part of a week per period, and the businesses this is built for do not have a spare person or a spare week.
So it gets done annually instead of monthly, or it gets done when something has already gone wrong. That gap is the whole opportunity, and it is a scheduling problem rather than a software one.
WHAT THIS IS NOT
Keep every system you already run
MarginLoop is not a replacement for anything on this page, and there is no migration.
- It is not an EPOS. It does not take a payment or serve a customer.
- It is not an accounts package. It raises no invoice and files nothing.
- It is not a stock system. It does not hold your stock record or receive a delivery.
- It never writes back. Access is read-only, so nothing it does can change a figure in a system you rely on.
- It does not replace your judgement. Target cover, which supplier to ring and whether to chase an account stay yours.
FAQ
Three more, asked in exactly these words
Your ledgers hold what you were invoiced and what you paid, completely and accurately. Whether a rebate condition was met is a comparison between your purchase volumes over a period and the terms of an agreement, and in most independent wholesalers that agreement is a signed PDF in somebody's inbox rather than data in any system. Where a product does have rebate or discount handling, the same constraint applies: it can only reconcile against terms that were entered into it, tier by tier, and kept current as they are renegotiated. The gap is usually not the software. It is that nobody has ever put the agreements somewhere a computer can read them and checked the ledger against them every period.
Not sure which of these you are missing?
The free fit check is thirty minutes and needs no data. We look at what you run, what you can export from it, and whether there is a commercial question here worth answering.