AI for Distributors: Orders, Price History and Supplier Bills

Where distributors lose time

Distributors lose most of their office time to the same few jobs repeated many times a month: looking up prices, writing orders, entering bills and preparing invoices.

A distribution business buys from suppliers and sells to customers, usually with a margin that depends on getting the price right on every line. The sales and buying decisions are where the skill lies. The work around them is typing: copying a product description from an old invoice, finding what was paid last time, retyping a supplier bill into the accounting system, attaching the PDF, filing it, preparing the matching sales invoice.

Each task is small. Together they fill days. And because the same information is typed several times, in several places, mistakes creep in: an old price quoted, a bill entered twice, an invoice without the right tax wording.

AI for distributors is useful exactly here. Not for deciding what to buy or what to charge, but for preparing the paperwork from data the business already has, so a person checks and signs instead of typing. The table shows the main jobs and the status of each one in our own offer.

One thing to say plainly at the start: none of this changes how you trade. Your suppliers, your customers, your terms and your margins stay as they are. The point of AI for distributors is that the documents around each trade are prepared from data you already hold, checked by a person, and filed where anyone can find them later.

Price history and quoting

A price history tracker is a register of every product line you have ever bought and sold, with its price per unit, and it is the foundation for faster quoting.

Most distributors already have this information. It sits in past invoices and supplier bills, spread across years of PDFs. What they lack is one place to look it up. When a customer asks for a price, someone searches old emails for the last invoice to that customer, then for the last bill from the supplier, then works out the margin.

Our price history robot, running today, rebuilds that register from past invoices and keeps it up to date automatically as new documents arrive. Each line carries the product, the date, the customer or supplier, the quantity and the price per unit. It is used to quote from the last price: what you paid, what you charged, and when.

Quote automation builds on the register. A draft quote is prepared from the customer, the product and the last price, for a person to check, adjust and send. Drafting the quote itself is offered and built to order; the price history behind it runs today. Either way, the price decision stays with a person.

Purchase orders

Purchase order automation turns one row in a sheet into a finished purchase order, filed and ready to send, after two confirmations from a person.

Ordering by hand means opening a template, typing the supplier, the products, the quantities, the prices and the delivery terms, saving it as a PDF, filing it and writing the covering email. For a distributor placing many orders a month, that is hours of careful typing where one wrong digit costs money.

Our purchase order robot is running today. The route is short and the person stays in control at both ends.

A price register also catches problems that are easy to miss by hand. A supplier price that jumped since the last order, a customer still invoiced at a rate agreed long ago, the same product described three different ways on three invoices: all of these show up when every line sits in one register instead of in scattered PDFs. The register shows them; a person decides what to do about each one.

1. A person fills one row in the orders sheet: supplier, products, quantities, prices, terms.
2. The person marks the row as confirmed, and confirms a second time to release it.
3. The robot renders the purchase order PDF from the row.
4. It files the PDF in the right folder.
5. It prepares a draft email to the supplier with the PDF attached, and a message in the client app.
6. The order is ready to send, with the PDF filed and the email drafted.

Supplier bills

Supplier bills are entered as drafts with the PDF attached and filed under the supplier, and anything unclear goes to a person.

A distributor with many suppliers receives bills in every shape: tidy PDFs from regular suppliers, scans of paper delivery bills, credit notes mixed in with invoices, the odd bill forwarded from a colleague's mailbox. Entering them is the classic supplier bills chore.

Our bills robot, running today, reads the mailbox and a drop folder, recognizes supplier invoices and credit notes, and creates the draft bill in the accounting system with the PDF attached. It files the PDF under the supplier and sends one notification per bill. Regular suppliers are read by template, scans by text recognition and the rest with a model's help.

Two rules keep it safe. Anything it cannot enter exactly, such as a refund or a bill from an unknown supplier, goes to a person instead of being guessed. And a new supplier is created only after the owner approves it, so the supplier list stays clean.

Sales invoices

Sales invoices are prepared from a sheet that remembers your customers and products, with the tax wording applied at creation and a draft email beside each one.

Invoicing errors in distribution tend to be small and repeated: the wrong customer address, a missing tax number, wording that does not match the type of sale. Each one can mean a reissued invoice or a question from the accountant later.

Our invoicing robot is running today. A person marks a row ready in the sheet; the robot checks it, renders the PDF, files it in the customer's folder, creates a draft invoice in the accounting system with the PDF attached and prepares a draft email. The tax wording follows the rules your accountant gave for each kind of sale. A person reviews and sends.

What it does not do is just as clear:

• It does not set prices or decide discounts.
• It does not send invoices or chase payments by itself.
• It does not decide the tax treatment of a sale; it applies the rules your accountant set, and anything outside them goes to a person.
• It does not post invoices as final; they wait as drafts for approval.

Where to start

Start with the job your team repeats most often and can check most easily, usually supplier bills or purchase orders, and measure it by your own count.

The order matters because the jobs feed each other. Supplier bills and sales invoices give the price history its data; the price history makes quotes and purchase orders quicker to check. AI for distributors works best when it is added one job at a time, each one running cleanly before the next is switched on, and each one stopped with one command if something looks wrong.

AI for wholesale distributors does not need a new accounting system or a new mailbox. Ours run on our servers against your own accounts, today with Google Workspace mailboxes, Google Drive, Google Sheets and Xero. They are rented monthly, one figure per workflow, stated in the quote, and everything they produce stays in your own systems.

Use the calculator on this page to count your own monthly hours on orders, purchase orders and bills. It uses only your figures and makes no promise about what would change. If one job clearly dominates, that is where to begin.

Then write the job down: where the work arrives, the steps, the exceptions and who signs. A price history is often the best second job, because once it exists, quoting and ordering both get faster to check.

Some things stay outside the scope, whatever the job. AI for distributors as we build it does not negotiate with suppliers, promise delivery dates to customers or move money. Those remain with the people who know the trade.

Questions