For wholesale, distribution & B2B sales
Every order that arrives by email gets typed in again by hand.
Your customers send you the information. Then somebody on your team reads it and types it into a second system. That second step is the one worth removing.
The five you’ll recognise
- Purchase orders arrive as email or PDF and get re-keyed by hand into your inventory system
- Quotes built in a spreadsheet from a price list that was current last quarter
- “Have you got stock?” answered by walking to the warehouse or opening a second system
- Rep visit notes that never reach the order desk, so the desk quotes something the rep already discounted
- A customer who orders every eight weeks, quietly forgotten in week nine
What the retyping costs
Two numbers. The second one is the one that actually matters.
Say 150 orders a month arrive by email, and each takes six minutes to read, key in and check. That’s 15 hours a month — most of a working week, every month, spent copying information that was already correct when it arrived.
Now the part people underestimate. Say one order in fifty gets keyed wrong — you’ll know your own rate better than we do. That’s three wrong orders a month. Each one is a credit, a re-pick, a freight leg, a phone call, and a customer who now checks your paperwork.
The hours are a cost. The errors are a reputation problem, and they’re why this is usually the first thing we’d fix in a business like yours.
The systems you’re already running
Most NZ wholesalers and distributors this size are on Cin7 or Unleashed— both founded here, both with a B2B portal, and both perfectly capable systems that happen to sit next to an email inbox they don’t talk to. Some are on MYOB Acumatica or Katana. A CRM like Pipedrive or HubSpot holding the sales side, Starshipit on dispatch, Xero underneath.
We’re not going to replace your inventory system or your ERP. That would be an expensive, disruptive project with a real chance of making things worse. The gap is the inbox at one end and the order desk at the other.
How we build it, and why that matters
An order never posts without one of your people approving it. The automation reads the purchase order, matches the customer and the product codes, and puts a draft in front of a human. They check it and release it.
That takes seconds instead of six minutes, and it keeps a person between a misread PDF and a pallet going out wrong. We build it that way on purpose and we won’t build it any other way — if that’s not what you want, we’re the wrong supplier and we’d say so early.
Your pipeline, in your words
- 01
Be findable
Buyers can't see your range or your terms
- 02
The enquiry
“Have you got stock?” takes a walk to the warehouse
- 03
The order
Every emailed order gets typed in again
- 04
Dispatch & invoice
The customer chases you for the ETA
- 05
The reorder
A customer who buys every eight weeks, forgotten in week nine
01Be findable
No usable catalogue online, so every new buyer starts with an email asking what you stock.
Buyers who order from whoever answered first.
02The enquiry
Availability answered by opening a second system, or by asking someone who's standing near the racking.
Hours a week, and orders quoted that can't actually ship.
03The order
Purchase orders arrive as email or PDF and get re-keyed by hand into Cin7 or Unleashed. Quotes built in a spreadsheet from last quarter's price list.
Most of a working week each month, plus the wrong-order credits.
04Dispatch & invoice
Back-orders and delays communicated only when someone rings to ask. Dispatch and invoicing entered separately.
Goodwill, and the admin of answering avoidable questions.
05The reorder
No prompt against each customer's actual buying cycle, so reorders depend on them remembering you.
Predictable revenue, left to chance.
What we’d automate
- Emailed or PDF purchase orders turned into a draft order in your inventory system, for a person to approve
- Quotes generated from live pricing and live stock, so nothing gets quoted that can't ship
- Stock availability answered automatically, or pushed into your CRM so the rep has it in front of them
- Back-order and ETA notifications that go out before the customer chases you
- Reorder prompts based on each customer's actual buying cycle rather than a generic campaign
Where AI earns its keep here
This is the clearest case for it anywhere in what we do.
An order arrives as a PDF attached to an email. Every customer formats theirs differently, half of them send a scan, and one of them still faxes. It gets read, matched to the right customer and the right product codes, and turned into a draft order — which one of your people approves before it posts.
The typing stops. The checking doesn’t. That’s the whole design, and it’s why this is the safest high-value automation available to a business like yours.
What we won’t do is let it set prices, apply discounts or make credit decisions. Those stay with your people, because that’s judgement rather than data entry.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.