Mrs Blather and I now have a wholesale business in addition to our store. Being lazy, I’m looking for some sort of SW that will track all of our outstanding sales (i.e., from our customers) and our orders to our vendors so that when a new customer places an order we can say “100 units widget A can ship on May 10, but widget B won’t be available til September”.
I started doing this in a spreadsheet, but we have about 100 products and 75 customers, so it is fairly unwieldy.
It’s not just a simple inventory problem, because I want to keep track of what we expect to get in rather than just what we have on hand. There must be packages that do this sort of thing, but I’m not sure what it’s called, so I can’t search for it.
The APICS term for that calculation is “Available to Promise” but I’ve seen it called other things in some packages. Typically it accounts for all types of outbound demand (customer orders, replenishment to other warehouses, etc.) and all types of inbound supply (purchase orders, work orders for internal manufacturing, resupply orders from other warehouse, forecasts for future supply, etc.) and it will project forward in daily/weekly/monthly buckets.
All major ERP/MRP players have it, smaller packages you will have to check to see if they do.
It’s pretty common but not sure if something really low end like Quicken (or QuickBooks, or whatever it’s called) would have it.
IIRC quickbooks Point of sale has purchase order handling in it. Not sure if the exact functionality you want is there but it may be cheaper than enterprise unless you already run enterprise.
I used to consult in this stuff for major retail and wholesale companies. Theirs cost $$$$$$$ but there is definitely software out there for smaller businesses. The general term you want is “supply chain” software and there is a bunch of it out there. Some should be affordable to you but it gets very expensive very fast. It all depends on where you see your business going. If it will always be very small (under $1 million in sales a year) you might get by with something off the shelf with some minor tweaks. If you see yourself growing into a medium sized business, you need to set up the right foundation and that foundation does not consist of spreadsheets.
The cheapest enterprise level software I have bought for a small company cost about 100K all inclusive but they have about $30 million in sales annually. There are cheaper solutions but you will generally need to spend in the four to five figures depending on your needs. There are supply chain consultants that can help you. They cost about $100 an hour but it may be well worth it. What I will go ahead and forbid you to do is cobble together some slightly cheaper solution in the hope of saving money. That always backfires in a huge way. Something that business owners don’t always understand is that software is not really there just to serve their whims. Good software enforces industry standards and best practices and it is usually preferable for the business to adapt to the software as long as the software is reputable. Customizing such software according to your whims is mostly bad news as well and supply chain consultants usually forbid their clients from doing it for a variety of reasons but especially to maintain upgradability from the software maker.