Top Ten Problems Solved by SAP Business One in Wholesale
Problem #2: Manual Order Processing
If you’re in wholesale distribution, chances are you’ve felt the pain of manual order processing. When your team has to enter every order by hand, whether it arrives by email, phone, spreadsheet, or PDF, the risks multiply:
- Errors creep in
- Orders slow down
- Costs go up
- Customers get frustrated
Combined with increasing order volume as your business grows, manual processing simply doesn’t scale.
Manual order processing slows you down
Many small to mid-sized distributors rely on manual order processing when:
- Sales or admin staff manually retype customer orders into your system
- Orders arrive via inconsistent channels (email, PDF, fax) and must be read, interpreted, and manually typed in
- Pricing, product codes, or customer details are copied incorrectly
- Orders are incomplete, duplicated, or entered into the wrong workflow
All of this costs time and money, and more importantly, it delays fulfilment and risks causing damage to customer satisfaction.
In wholesale, speed and accuracy are crucial. Your customers expect you to deliver the right products quickly and reliably. But with manual processes, you’re holding on to unnecessary risks.
How SAP Business One helps
SAP Business One helps you move from manual to managed. It gives your team the tools to automate key steps, reduce effort, and improve order accuracy.
- Integrated Sales Order Process
With SAP Business One, sales documents, such as quotation, sales order, delivery note, and invoice are linked together. Key data is carried forward automatically, so your team doesn’t need to retype it every time.
When a sales order is created: Inventory is reserved automatically.
- Inventory is reserved automatically
- Tax and shipping details are filled in
- Documents are linked, making it easy to trace the full order lifecycle
This not only speeds things up, but also reduces the chance of errors.
- Availability Check at Order Entry
SAP Business One includes real-time availability checks during order entry. That means:
- If stock is low, your team is notified
- Sales staff can see whether orders can be fulfilled before making promises to customers
- Automating Order Capture
SAP Business One can be extended with tools to capture orders automatically through:
- Direct integration with your online shop/marketplace
- Importing structured orders from EDI or Excel files
- Reading PDFs or email orders and converting them into sales orders
- Real-Time Status and Alerts
Once an order is in SAP Business One, you gain instant visibility:
- What’s been entered
- What’s awaiting picking or packing
- What’s delayed or incomplete
This helps everyone, including warehouse and finance teams, to stay aligned.
Fewer errors mean fewer credit notes and fewer calls chasing orders, so customer service teams also save their time.
What it looks like in practice
Let’s say a customer sends in a PDF order for 25 items.
In a manual process, someone prints or reads that PDF, checks product codes and pricing, retypes it into the ERP, and maybe follows up for missing information.
What’s possible with SAP Business One?
- The PDF data can be automatically captured from email
- A sales order is created using up-to-date customer pricing
- Stock availability is checked and committed
- Order status is visible to sales, customer service, and warehouse teams
All of this results in less admin, faster fulfilment, and fewer costly mistakes.
Take the next step
In the next blog in this series, we highlight problems caused by lack of real-time visibility.
To find out how SAP Business One from LAKE could help your business, download a copy of our SAP Business One Beginners Guide – Wholesale.
By Agata Lech