Wholesale easily becomes four departments, four sheets: sales quotes, warehouse stock, purchasing in-transit, finance cash. The usual miss: sales promised stock, the warehouse has none; purchasing replenished, sales already substituted another SKU; month-end discount lives in WeChat. Inventory is not four modules side by side. It is one order walking four lanes. Lanes pass order number and state — not screenshots.
String the main chain before multi-price and multi-warehouse
The main chain is: ATP (not any book number) → sales order reserves → outbound deducts → gap becomes PO → inbound releases in-transit → reconcile by order. Miss a link and the floor fills with WeChat. Stock matching the books is in How a system makes inventory match the books. Order to cash is in how a system cuts one more fight. Multi-price, multi-warehouse, and customer terms are wholesale defaults. They sit on customer and item — not a sales note. Sheets collapse at scale. See Excel inventory breaks once volume grows.
Exceptions must enter a lane: rush jump, free goods, return/swap, one order many warehouses. If they stay in the group, the swimlane is a poster. Use the system as the work entry, not a copy after shipping. See ledger vs. operations system. Finance-only go-live with the warehouse still on a sheet breaks the lane at finance. See What happens if you only go live with finance.
How far phase one must go to count as strung
Two weeks running: new orders enter the system, outbound has a pick list, a PO can be clicked from a gap, finance can export open items by customer. If not, do not start production or complex MRP. Those buttons are often gray in a packaged ERP. See a packaged ERP nobody uses. DaXi draws the lanes from your price rules and warehouse layout, then builds. To string wholesale inventory, go to Business systems service page with the quote sheet and outbound method you use. Path difference with and without a system is in how the work path differs. If the floor is still messy, run the diagnostic list before adding warehouses. See The system is live and the floor is still messy.
Forecast can wait. A transfer must be a document
Do not make dealer demand “smart” in phase one. Walk real orders and real stock first. A credit limit that blocks at order time beats finance discovering overdue terms at month-end. One item many codes, barcodes, and alt units are wholesale traps. Name a master-data owner before scan. Strung means sales does not enter the warehouse group to ask “do we still have it.”
A multi-warehouse transfer is its own document. Do not “borrow from A, return to B” inside sales outbound. Verbal lend/return makes ATP lie. Promo price windows need hour precision so a midnight order does not take the old price. A return inbound must link the original or a swap becomes two stock stories. Write these into the exception column. Covering the three most frequent exceptions in phase one is worth more than an unused full returns module. Ask finance before contract whether statements are by customer or by order. Do not fight that after launch. A swimlane on the warehouse wall beats a training deck for who gets the document next.