Food Distribution Software for Wine and Food Inventory Management in Wholesale Distribution

Food and wine inventory management is one of the biggest sources of unavailable cash for F&B wholesale distribution companies. Due to the nature of the industry, businesses need to keep a large portfolio of items in stock. At the same time, suppliers often push distributors to carry more inventory, which increases the financial burden.

Inventory levels represent one part of the challenge, while sales represent the other. Both areas that distribution businesses must carefully manage. In addition, wholesale distribution companies often need to expand geographically while building strong, deep relationships with the top 20% of their customers who drive most of the sales.

With demands coming from every part of the business and the market, food and beverage distribution companies need specialized software to help manage operations effectively. A good food and beverage distribution software provides complete inventory management, order management, warehouse management, and quality control compliance. These functions help reduce spoilage and waste in the warehouse, prevent stockouts, strengthen relationships with reliable suppliers, accurately forecast seasonal or peak demand, and ensure full audit and traceability across the supply chain.

Additional Charges and Invoice Management

Because it’s the F&B industry, your customers and suppliers are not always located near you. Sometimes, it can even involve importing goods from another continent. In these situations, you may need to apply additional charges for customers based on various factors. In the food distribution software, we support managing additional charges, shipping, invoicing terms, and flexible regulations:

Additional Charges can be applied proportionally to each item line, or you can choose to assign specific charges to individual items within the order.
You can choose shipment terms like FOB or DAP when you create a Sales Order for a customer, based on location as well as buyer requirement.
Additional charges can be edited and added after you ship out the order to the customer, so it is more flexible in case of any fluctuations from the market.
Credit or payment terms are customized according to your business process if you want customers to pay in advance or pay in 30, 60, 90 days. This is fully adjustable based on your company’s internal agreements and customer preferences.

Access Control & User Permissions

When it comes to human resource management, wholesale distribution companies need to establish accessibility along with accountability for each employee as this is crucial to ensuring compliance and transparency in a large operation.

You can set up access rights such as view, edit, or both for specific employees for customers, orders, and products. This ensures that only the person in charge can access and work with the data they are responsible for.
Setting accessibility or assigning roles to employees not only improves transparency but also makes it easier to trace mistakes when unexpected situations occur.

When it comes to reports, it’s necessary to assign responsibility to each employee. For example, a purchase manager or a sales manager overseeing many sales reps needs performance tracking over time. This data is essential for making business decisions.

Filter report results such as Commission Overall Report, Fulfillment Report, and Conversion Report by sales rep name to evaluate their performance.
For management roles, in beverage distribution software, wholesale distribution companies have roles like purchasing manager, portfolio manager, or sales manager. Assigning approval rights to these people in terms of reviewing, approving, or rejecting a submission from their roles can help improve your operations.

Simple CRM Module and Performance Tracking

While busy wholesale distribution companies expand both in breadth and depth with consignment stores, multiple warehouses in different locations with multiple sales staff, managing transparency and ensuring complete information is accurately transmitted from the head office to each sales staff or consignment store is a need and a must for them.
With a simple CRM module built into EMERGE, you can manage and track information, especially related to sales and business activities.

Every sales rep can access and create leads, opportunities, and gradually convert them into customers. It’s proactive because your reps can record their work themselves, reducing data entry or the need to constantly ask questions like “how many users did you gain?” or similar back-and-forth conversations.
In this CRM module, you can export the CRM Conversion Report, filtered by each sales rep, to show their performance: how many leads they started with, how many opportunities are ongoing, and how many customers they ultimately converted.

If your wholesale business tracks performance by revenue generated by each sales rep, you can use more specific reports like the Commission Overall Report or Fulfillment Report, and simply apply filters by their name.

The Activity Historical Event feature in EMERGE will update and show exactly who did what and when. Of course, this information is only visible to those in charge of monitoring and managing company activities.

Portfolio and Wine Inventory Management

For businesses involved in wine wholesale or distribution, portfolio management is closely tied to company cash flow and overall business growth. It’s a balancing act of mixing both finite and common products to build the most attractive catalog for customers.

The more effective wine inventory management is, the more practical and appealing your portfolio becomes. This involves tracking and analyzing fast-moving and slow-moving products, their seasonal performance, and sales trends.
The Product Trends Report in EMERGE helps you identify which items are performing well or underperforming over time.
The Inventory Forecast Report supports your decision-making. Since wine inventory management must follow market demand to stock trending items or reduce slow-moving ones, this report uses a minimum of 6 months of data (we recommend 1 year of data) to estimate demand based on sales and turnover across your different locations, as we understand you may have multiple branches.

Since most wine wholesale distribution companies rely on importers as suppliers, building a strong portfolio depends not only on internal decisions but also on how you approach and work with the right wine importers. While it may not be the most highlighted feature, EMERGE offers the Supplier Delivery Performance Report to help you easily track the performance of all your importers, especially in the manner of time. After all, not every importer offers the best service or pricing, and many may try to push excessive inventory on you.

Batch & Serial Number Management

For F&B wholesale distribution businesses, managing the shelf life of goods is one of the most important factors in food inventory management. Missing out products leading to spoilage will cost you a lot of money and even worse when you deliver poor quality products to customers. Most businesses use the FIFO (First In, First Out) method, while the rest use the LIFO (Last In, First Out) method to manage inventory costs as well as control quality. But this depends a lot on the goods you sell as well as the needs of the company.

In EMERGE, we use the FIFO method to suggest batches that are nearing expiration during the picking process in the warehouse. This helps warehouse staff easily pick and pack items without any confusion about which batch to select.
Batch numbers and serial numbers can be easily generated in EMERGE. Whenever a new batch of product is manufactured or you receive new products in stock from a supplier, simply assign a specific lot/serial number or let the software generate it automatically.

These numbers serve as the unique identifiers for the items you produce and sell, staying attached to the products throughout their shelf life and even after they have been sold. With this, you can trace products both backward and forward based on their assigned batch or serial number.

With serial number management, when you sell a product, you can assign a warranty period to it. Later on, if a customer submits a support case for warranty replacement or return, you can easily track the product by its serial number and check whether it is still under warranty.
For food inventory management, assigning batch numbers to your products makes it much easier to handle product recalls if they ever occur. Of course, we hope that never happens, but for the sake of your company’s reputation, managing inventory by batch is essential.

Production management

For wineries, wine producers, or any businesses that manufacture and wholesale products, having a robust wine inventory management system is crucial. The reason is, you are not only selling but also producing. EMERGE is tailored for wine inventory management from the moment you harvest the grapes, through wine barrel fulfillment for customers, and even after the sale.

The Production Module in EMERGE simplifies your manufacturing process. You can create production line templates for specific B2B orders, using different raw materials, concentrations, and finished products at each stage of production.
All of your customized batch productions are stored in one centralized place, where you can link each production line to the related sales orders you’ve created. The status of every production line is updated in real-time, and you can also generate full production reports for both ongoing and completed orders.

For assembly businesses in the food industry, you can even create seasonal promotional campaigns using the production module. The idea is to assemble gift sets by combining raw materials and main products into one production line. This approach helps solve multiple problems at once: batches nearing expiration can be used as gifts attached to main products to boost sales, reducing overstock while maintaining accurate inventory costs when bundling products together. For many companies, selling products in bundles or packs is common practice, as this is typical in wholesale distribution companies.

Warehouse Management Capabilities

If the wine industry focuses more on production, then food and beverage wholesale businesses need strong warehouse management to handle everything from receiving goods from suppliers to fulfilling and shipping orders to customers. With practical and stable warehouse features, EMERGE makes your food inventory management work easier and more straightforward.

In EMERGE, you can create and monitor multiple warehouses and locations. Within each warehouse, you can divide them into different sections to keep your food inventory organized. You can separate areas by categories such as dry goods, frozen items, fresh produce, or beverages. Alternatively, you can arrange them based on the FIFO method, where newer stock is always placed behind older stock during replenishment (especially for businesses that focus on specific product types).
Our barcode management solution helps speed up operations and ensures accuracy during fulfillment, reducing mistakes and delays. You can scan barcodes when products are received, when picking items for orders, and when packing them for shipment, keeping the process accurate from start to finish.
Label printing is built directly into EMERGE, removing extra steps. You simply go to the sales order, select the shipping details, and print the shipping label to ensure everything is correct. Barcodes and product labels can also be printed in bulk, with options for size, quantity, and layout.
Inside EMERGE, warehouse tasks like inventory adjustment and stock transfer are easy to perform. The value of your stock will always move together with the quantity you transfer between warehouses, and adjustments can be made as needed to keep your inventory records accurate.