Who it's for / Wholesale & distribution
For wholesalers & distributors
Inventory management software — and what to do when your wholesale business outgrows it.
Every roundup ranks the same stock and order tools. Here's a fair look at where they fit, where a growing distributor hits the wall, and the option none of the lists mention: software built exactly around how your orders actually flow, a module at a time.
The real options.
Inventory and order management software keeps stock, orders, customers and pricing in one system instead of a wall of spreadsheets. For a wholesaler coming off Excel it's a real step up — and for a lot of businesses, one of these is exactly the right answer.
| Tool | Known for | Typically best for |
|---|---|---|
| Unleashed | Cloud stock control with a tight Xero pairing (Access Group) | Small-to-mid UK wholesalers on Xero |
| Cin7 Core | Inventory + orders with hundreds of channel integrations (the old DEAR Systems) | Product SMEs mixing B2B with online channels |
| inFlow | Simple and quick to adopt | Small wholesalers graduating from spreadsheets |
| Zoho Inventory | Cheapest credible entry point, with a free tier | Micro firms with modest order volumes |
| Khaos Control | UK-built all-in-one — stock, orders, CRM and accounting | UK multichannel wholesalers wanting one system |
| Orderwise | Heavy-duty UK system with warehouse management (Forterro) | Warehouse-led distributors |
| Sage 200 | The incumbent UK mid-market ERP, sold and implemented via partners | Firms outgrowing Sage 50 — a project, not a sign-up |
| NetSuite | Full cloud ERP — the upper-end path | Larger, multi-entity distributors |
A snapshot, not a ranking — and check who owns what today: Unleashed belongs to The Access Group, Orderwise to Forterro, and Cin7 is private-equity-owned (Cin7 Core is the old DEAR). Some big names are missing on purpose: Veeqo (Amazon-owned), Linnworks and Brightpearl are built for multichannel ecommerce sellers, not B2B wholesale. If one of these fits how your business actually works, buy it — we'd tell you to, and help you wire it in. This page is for the businesses it doesn't fit.
Where a growing distributor hits the wall.
A stock system is built around how most product businesses work. Your edge — the pricing, the service, the way you keep the awkward accounts happy — is the part that isn't like most businesses. That's the part the box can't bend to. So the workarounds start:
- Orders arrive by email and PDF, and someone types them into the system — then types them again into the courier portal, and the awkward ones into the accounts package too. The re-keying is the job.
- The pricing logic that wins the business — customer-specific price lists, quantity breaks, the deals that live in the owner's head — sits in a spreadsheet beside the ERP, understood by one person.
- Stock truth splits three ways: what the system thinks, what the warehouse knows, and what the customer was told on the phone.
- The traditional fix is a bigger box: a mid-market ERP implemented over months by a partner, priced per user, that still expects your process to bend to it — and the feature you actually need sits in a roadmap queue.
The cost of standing still
Thin margins, manual orders. The numbers are moving.
The UK has about 100,700 registered wholesale businesses, 97% of them with fewer than 50 staff (ONS, September 2025) — a sector of small firms carrying big product books. Three numbers worth sitting with:
Wholesale businesses in England and Wales that went insolvent in 2025 — the highest figure in the Insolvency Service's published series, which starts in 2016, and 44% above 2019 (figures as published June 2026, provisional). Margins in this trade don't forgive process waste. (Insolvency Service, June 2026)
Distribution-sector SMEs — the government survey grouping that includes wholesale — that offer trade credit and call late payment a problem. That's our arithmetic from the published 2023 table behind the Department for Business and Trade's late-payments research (29.6% of all distribution SMEs report a problem; just over half don't offer trade credit at all). If you invoice on terms, late payment is the norm, not the exception. (DBT / OSBC, July 2025)
The day every EU-to-GB import started needing a safety and security declaration. HMRC's own impact assessment puts the cost to business at £168 million a year (2014 prices), modelling £7–£38 per declaration through an intermediary and around 36 minutes of staff time to prepare the data — costs shared across the import chain, consignment after consignment. Paperwork per pallet went up, permanently. (HMRC impact assessment, January 2025)
What we'd build instead.
The smallest thing that removes your worst pain first, then the next — each module shaped around how your orders actually flow, live in weeks, and yours to own. For a wholesale business, that usually starts here:
Order intake that reads the email
Orders arriving by email or PDF are read by AI and become records on their own — with every line, price and quantity checked by deterministic rules, so a person only ever sees the ones that don't match.
One record, every system
The order flows to the warehouse, the courier and the accounts package without being retyped — the re-keying job designed out, not staffed up.
Your price book, made executable
Customer-specific price lists, quantity breaks and the deals in the owner's head become rules the system applies on every order — visible, versioned and no longer in one person's keeping.
Reconciliation that doesn't wait for month-end
Payments matched to invoices overnight, every night — someone only looks at what doesn't balance, and the chasing goes out on schedule.
Reports assembled overnight
Margin by customer, line and supplier built overnight, every night — not by whoever drew the short straw with the spreadsheets.
Every one is a capability we can build now with AI-assisted development — not a promise your business needs all of it. We start with the one that hurts most.
Where we've done it
We haven't built for a wholesaler. We've built this exact pattern.
A UK accountancy practice — a different trade, the same disease: documents arriving by email, the same details retyped between five subscriptions, a wall of spreadsheets holding it together — came to us and, a module at a time, left all five behind for one custom platform. Documents read by AI with every figure checked by maths, systems that stopped needing re-keying, reconciliation running nightly: the modules above are that same pattern, pointed at orders and stock instead of tax returns.
Fair questions
What wholesalers ask us.
What's the best inventory management software for a UK wholesaler?
There isn't one — it depends on your size and how you sell. Unleashed is the usual answer for a small-to-mid wholesaler on Xero, with Cin7 Core the main rival; Khaos Control and Orderwise are the UK-built all-in-ones for multichannel and warehouse-led businesses; Sage 200 and NetSuite are the ERP tier — proper implementation projects, not sign-up software. For many firms one of these is exactly right, and we'll tell you so.
Is there a free inventory management system?
Zoho Inventory has a genuinely free tier for modest order volumes, and several others offer free trials. For a micro business that can be plenty. The ceiling arrives with volume and complexity: customer-specific pricing, multiple channels, and the moment your process doesn't match the tool's assumptions you're back in spreadsheets alongside it.
Can I use Excel for inventory management?
You can, and most wholesalers do — usually beside the system that was supposed to replace it. That spreadsheet is the tell: it holds the customer price lists, the quantity breaks, the supplier quirks — the logic that actually wins the business and that no off-the-shelf tool could hold. It's also where the business is most exposed, because it's usually understood by exactly one person.
Do I need custom software, or is an ERP the answer?
An off-the-shelf tool is enough until the way your business actually wins orders lives in the part no tool covers. The traditional next step — a mid-market ERP — is a months-long partner implementation that still expects your process to bend to it. Custom on a monthly retainer is the third option: start with the single worst process, keep everything else you already use, and own the result.
How much does custom software for a wholesale business cost?
It's a monthly retainer, not a big up-front project — tiers from £2,500 to £6,500 a month, with a free process audit and an optional fixed-price discovery sprint first. You own the code and data from day one.
Start here
Bring us a week of your order inbox.
A free process audit is thirty minutes. Walk us through the part of running the business that wastes the most time — the order intake, the price book, the month-end — and you'll leave with a written map of what could run itself, whether or not we ever work together.
No pitch deck, no obligation. The map is yours either way.