How to Track Staggered Deliveries to Your Clients

From time to time you will sign a contract with a client under which you deliver your goods in stages, at set intervals, as the client needs them. In other words, not all at once.

Tracking deliveries like these can be difficult, for several reasons:

• You have to hold enough stock over a long period, which can put pressure on your warehouse space
• You have to keep track of which quantities have been delivered and what still has to go out
• You very often have to give the client visibility of the quantities delivered so far and what remains, so that both of you are working from the same figures

You can track staggered deliveries in the following ways:

• You can keep records with pen and paper. You can draw up a table on paper and then, each time a delivery goes out, write down every item delivered, keeping track of what remains by working out the undelivered quantities "by hand". This can be quite workable if there are not too many different items and only a handful of deliveries. The biggest problem, of course, is that there is no automation at all, which increases the scope for error. On top of that, all the other paperwork — delivery notes and so on — is produced separately from these records, which means everything has to be checked and reconciled repeatedly.
• You can keep records in Excel. You can build a table in Excel listing every item to be delivered, probably with columns for the dates of each staged delivery, and enter the quantities delivered on those dates. This is relatively easy to set up in Excel, and with a little effort you can probably automate it so that Excel calculates the quantities remaining after each delivery. The problem is that entering the data can take a long time if there are many items, and mistakes can creep in, which later leads to figures that are simply wrong. As before, all the paperwork has to be produced separately and everything has to be checked for consistency — whether the quantities entered in Excel match those on the delivery note, and match what was actually delivered. If you have no business software, or your business software does not support staggered deliveries, this is far better than pen and paper, but still not efficient enough, particularly with a large number of items.
• You can keep records in your business software. The best option is to handle this, like every other process, in your business software, because then everything is in one place and every process becomes more efficient.

TiramisuERP makes tracking staggered deliveries very simple:

Step 1 – Enter the contract you have with the client into the software, including all the agreed quantities and prices

Step 2 – Give the client access to TiramisuERP, so they can log in to the portal themselves, order the quantities they need for a given delivery, and see what has been delivered so far and how much remains

Step 3 – Automatically produce all the accompanying paperwork, such as delivery notes, that goes with each delivery

Step 4 – Have visibility of stock levels at any moment, and act in good time if more needs to be ordered.