Wholesale & Distribution Software in Bangladesh: Credit Sales, Routes and Dues

A retail shop's problem is stock. A wholesaler's problem is money that has already left the godown and has not come back. You load vans at seven in the morning, six SRs go out on their routes, forty retailers take goods, and by evening you have delivery slips, a bundle of cash, four cheques, some returned cartons and a rough idea of what is owed. The rough idea is the problem. Ask most distributors in Moulvibazar, Chawkbazar or Jessore what their total outstanding is today, and the honest answer is a figure from the register that is a few days old and probably missing a route.

This guide covers the parts of wholesale and distribution software that decide whether the business makes money: credit (baki) sales and limits, ageing of receivables, how collections are applied to invoices, SR routes and order booking, van stock reconciliation at day-end, party-wise prices and trade schemes, damaged and expired returns, cheque handling, and the split between godown and shop stock. There is a worked ageing table you can copy and a dues-control checklist you can run against your current system this week. Wholesale and distribution details.

Why a retail POS is not enough for a distributor

A retail till assumes the sale and the money happen at the same moment. In distribution they rarely do: the sale happens on the retailer's shelf, the payment happens next week, and between them sits a ledger that has to be right to the taka. Four things break on a plain retail system.

• The customer becomes a name, not an account. You need a party ledger per retailer with an opening balance, running due, credit limit and payment history, not a name field on a bill.
• One price for everyone. The same carton goes out at four prices depending on who is buying and how much. A single selling price forces manual discounts, and manual discounts are where margin leaks.
• Stock has one location. A distributor has a godown, a front shop, and goods sitting on vans that have left the godown but are not yet sold.
• No collection workflow. Cash and cheques come back in the evening from people who were never at the counter, and somebody has to attach each taka to a specific invoice.

Credit sales and credit limits

Baki is not a weakness in Bangladeshi distribution, it is the product. The retailer takes goods on credit, sells them over a week and pays from the proceeds. Software cannot stop credit; it can cap it and make it visible.

The limit has to bite at order entry

A credit limit in a notebook is a suggestion. In the system it should act at the moment the order is entered: show the current due, show what this order takes it to, and either hold the invoice for approval or block it. Set three things per party and the rest follows: credit limit, credit days (typically 7, 15 or 30 in FMCG) and a block rule for breaches: warn, require approval, or hard block.

The demo test is simple. Set a limit of ৳50,000 on a test party with ৳48,000 outstanding, book a ৳10,000 order, and watch the screen.

Terms belong to the party

Your oldest retailer on 30 days and a new shop on cash-on-delivery cannot share one setting. Credit days must be a property of the party, because ageing and overdue lists only mean anything when each invoice is measured against the term that retailer actually agreed to.

VAT does not wait for the money. If you are registered, the invoice is generally raised at supply rather than at payment, which means a credit sale can create a VAT liability and a receivable on the same day. The exact timing rule for credit supplies is one to settle with your VAT consultant before you set the system up, because getting it wrong shifts liability into the wrong month. Our Mushak 6.3 guide covers the invoice itself.

Ageing of receivables: the report that runs your week

Total outstanding is a vanity number. ৳6 lakh due is a healthy business if it was all invoiced in the last three weeks and a serious problem if a fifth of it is older than 90 days. Ageing splits the same total by invoice age, so you can see which part of the money is still moving.

Here is a worked example for a mid-sized FMCG distributor. The figures are illustrative (replace them with your own) but this is the shape your software should produce on demand.

Read it from the right. The ৳1,22,000 in 90+ is a fifth of the entire receivable book, and ৳1,10,000 of it belongs to one party who is also over his limit. That line deserves more management attention than the other four rows combined, and the action is not another phone call; it is a supply stop until a payment plan is agreed and the first instalment clears.

The middle buckets measure discipline. When 31–90 days holds 41 per cent of the book in a business selling on 15-day terms, the terms are not real. Either enforce them or reprice them.

Three habits make ageing useful rather than decorative. Run it weekly on the same day, because monthly ageing tells you what went wrong while weekly ageing lets you stop it. Age by due date rather than invoice date once terms differ by party, 20 days is overdue for a 15-day party and current for a 30-day one. And give every overdue row an owner, usually the SR whose route it sits on, with a next action and a date.

In MondayPOS, ageing comes out of the accounting module against the same party ledgers the invoices post to, so there is no second spreadsheet to reconcile. Accounting module.

Collection: against invoices, not on account

This is the most common silent failure in distribution bookkeeping. When an SR brings back ৳25,000, it can be recorded two ways. On account credits the party's balance without saying which invoices it settles. Against invoices allocates it: ৳12,000 clears invoice 4471, ৳13,000 part-pays 4519. Both reduce the total due by the same amount, so on a balance-only view they look identical.

They are not. Unallocated receipts destroy ageing. Old invoices stay in the 90+ bucket while new money floats in an unapplied pool, the report starts showing overdue amounts that were paid weeks ago, staff stop trusting it, and within a month everyone is back to the register. Disputes get worse too: when a retailer says "I paid for that delivery," you need the receipt attached to that invoice number, not a balance.

Good software shows the party's open invoices when you enter a receipt and lets the collector tick them off, applies partial payments oldest-first by default with an override when the retailer names a bill, keeps a small visible "unallocated receipts" figure that someone must clear, and prints a receipt naming the invoices settled so both copies agree.

Cheques are not cash until they clear

Collection comes back partly in cheques, often post-dated. A cheque is a promise with a date on it, and the system should treat it that way: record number, bank, branch and date at collection rather than at deposit; hold post-dated cheques in a separate state so they appear in a "cheques on hand" list with due dates and do not count as cash in hand; move them through deposited and then cleared.

On a bounce, the receipt reverses, the invoice reopens, the party's due goes back up automatically, any bank charge is recorded against the party if that is your policy, and the party is flagged. That should change how the retailer is treated the next morning, not three weeks later when someone reconciles the bank statement. Two bounces is normally the point at which terms move to cash-on-delivery. Dishonoured cheques also carry legal consequences under the Negotiable Instruments Act, with notice periods and time limits that matter if you ever pursue one.

Routes, order booking and van stock

Distribution runs on routes: a fixed set of retailers visited on a fixed day by a named SR. If routes live only in the SRs' heads, coverage cannot be measured and dues cannot be assigned.

Pre-sale or van sale

In pre-sale, the SR books orders on a phone, the godown picks overnight and a van delivers the next day. In van sale, the van carries the stock and the sale, delivery and often the collection happen in one visit. Pre-sale gives cleaner stock control; van sale is faster and suits the long tail of small retailers, but it puts a moving godown on the road. Many distributors run both. Either way, the software should record the visit even when there is no order: a route sheet showing 42 calls, 31 productive and 11 no-orders tells you something a sales report never will.

Because SRs work where the network drops, the order app has to hold data on the device and sync when coverage returns, the same offline-first requirement as a counter during load-shedding. How offline-first works.

Van stock and day-end reconciliation

Treat every van as a stock location, not a black hole. Loading is a documented transfer from godown to van, printed as a sheet the driver signs. Each invoice on the route deducts from the van, not the godown. At day-end, what is left transfers back. Because the van is a location, "what is on van 3 right now" has an answer.

Day-end reconciliation is the most valuable ten minutes in a distributor's day:

Opening load + top-ups − sales invoiced − returns brought back = stock physically on the van

Cash sales + collections received − expenses advanced = cash deposited

Anything left over is a variance, and every variance has a name because a van belongs to a route and a route belongs to an SR. Small differences are usually a missing return or an uninvoiced delivery; repeated one-way differences are not a paperwork problem. Run it daily and it stays small. The discipline is the same one that closes a supershop till, see day-end and shrinkage control.

Party-wise prices and trade schemes

Wholesale pricing is a matrix, not a number. Your system should handle it without staff typing manual discounts: price lists per customer group (wholesale, retail, institutional), party-specific rates for the few large accounts that negotiated their own price, quantity slabs (one rate to 9 cartons, another from 10, another from 50) and validity dates so a promotional rate expires by itself instead of running until someone notices.

Schemes are how FMCG pushes volume, and they should be recorded as schemes rather than smuggled in as discounts. The usual shapes are quantity-based free goods (buy 10, get 1), value-based discounts (5 per cent above ৳50,000) and target-based incentives paid at month-end. Two rules keep them from eating you alive. Free goods must leave stock as free goods, because a carton that was never deducted reappears later as a mystery shortage. And when the principal funds the scheme, the claim must be recorded against that principal as it is given, so you can raise it with evidence at month-end instead of reconstructing it from delivery slips. Decide once how a free carton is shown on the Mushak 6.3 invoice.

Returns from retailers: damaged, expired and unsold

Goods come back constantly in FMCG: crushed cartons, leaking packs, expired stock under a company return policy, and unsold slow movers a retailer negotiates back. Saleable returns go back into godown stock at full value. Damaged returns go to a separate quarantine location, never back into sellable stock, and wait for a claim or a write-off. Expired returns go to quarantine with batch and expiry recorded, then to the principal's claim process or destruction.

Every return should produce a credit note against the original invoice, so the retailer's due falls by the right amount and ageing reflects it. Returns handled as a verbal "adjust it next time" are how a ৳20,000 dispute survives for six months. If you are VAT-registered, a sales return normally needs a prescribed credit note document rather than an edit to the original invoice: confirm which form and which procedure apply to you, and make sure the software can produce that document rather than just reversing a line. Watch the damage rate by route and by SR: damage is a handling problem, and it concentrates where handling is worst.

Godown stock versus shop stock

Most distributors also sell over the counter from the front of the premises. If godown and shop are one number, neither is reliable: the shop sells a carton the godown had already promised to a van, and the gap surfaces a week later. Keep them as separate locations with a documented transfer between them, and apply the same rule to vans. A distributor with a main godown, a front shop and four vans has six stock locations, plus a damaged-goods location and, if you handle medicine or food, a near-expiry quarantine. Each needs an owner and a counting schedule: front shop weekly, godown monthly by category. Inventory module and multi-location control.

The reports an owner actually needs

Distribution generates enormous amounts of data and very few decisions. These produce decisions.

Party-wise dues with ageing. The table above, weekly, with the top ten overdue parties on one page.

SR-wise collection. Invoiced, collected, collection percentage and closing overdue per SR for the month. This is the number that should sit behind an SR's incentive, because a salesman paid on sales alone will sell to anyone.

Slow-paying parties. Average days to pay over six months, next to each retailer's margin contribution. Some slow payers are worth financing; others are quietly subsidised, and putting the two columns side by side makes the argument concrete instead of emotional.

Route productivity. Calls, productive calls, average order value and lines per order, by route and day.

Van variance summary. Yesterday's stock and cash differences by van, with anything unexplained after 24 hours escalated.

Scheme and claim register. What was given away this month, against which principal, and what has been claimed and received.

MondayPOS produces these from the same ledgers used for billing and stock, so the collection figure in the SR report and the receipt in the accounting module are one record. Reports and BI.

A dues-control checklist

Run this against your current setup. Every "no" is money sitting in someone else's shop.

• [ ] Every retailer has a party account with an opening balance, credit limit and credit days.
• [ ] The credit limit is enforced at order entry, not checked afterwards.
• [ ] Ageing is produced by the system, weekly, in 0–30 / 31–60 / 61–90 / 90+ buckets.
• [ ] Ageing is calculated from due dates, using each party's own terms.
• [ ] Every receipt is allocated to specific invoices; unallocated receipts have an owner and are cleared weekly.
• [ ] Cheques carry number, bank and date, move through deposited and cleared, and a bounce reopens the invoice automatically.
• [ ] Post-dated cheques appear in a "cheques on hand" list with due dates.
• [ ] Each van is a stock location, and loading and unloading are documented transfers.
• [ ] Van stock and van cash are reconciled daily, with variances named and closed within 24 hours.
• [ ] Prices come from party or group price lists, not from discounts typed at billing.
• [ ] Free goods and schemes are recorded as schemes, deducted from stock and claimed from the principal.
• [ ] Damaged and expired returns go to quarantine locations and generate credit notes.
• [ ] Godown, shop and vans are separate locations with counts on a schedule.
• [ ] SR-wise collection, not just sales, drives incentives.
• [ ] The owner can see total outstanding and the 90+ figure without asking anyone.

Questions to ask at a demo

1. 1Set a credit limit, then book an order that breaches it. What happens on screen, and who can override it?
2. 2Show me an ageing report in four buckets, aged by due date, for a party on 15-day terms.
3. 3Allocate a ৳25,000 collection across two invoices, then show the party ledger and the ageing before and after.
4. 4Enter a post-dated cheque and bounce it. Show the invoice reopening and the due going back up.
5. 5Load a van, sell four invoices, bring back one damaged carton and reconcile at day-end. Where does the variance appear?
6. 6Give one item three prices (wholesale, retail and a slab above 10 cartons) without typing a discount at billing.
7. 7Apply a buy-10-get-1 scheme and show the free unit leaving stock and the claim recorded against the principal.
8. 8Take an expired return, quarantine it and issue the credit note.
9. 9Show SR-wise collection percentage for last month and the ten slowest-paying parties.
10. 10Unplug the network on the SR's phone, book an order, reconnect. Where is the order?
11. 11What is the total first-year cost for my outlets, vans and users, including migration and training? Pricing.

The bottom line

In distribution, stock control is the easy half. The hard half is the discipline that turns delivered goods back into cash: a credit limit that bites at order entry, ageing you look at weekly and believe, receipts allocated to invoices instead of floating on account, cheques tracked to clearance, vans reconciled daily, and prices and schemes that come from the system rather than an SR's judgement. None of that is exotic software. It is ordinary bookkeeping done every day instead of every month, which is exactly the thing software is good at enforcing.

To see credit limits, ageing and van reconciliation running on your own party list and routes, book a demo or start free. Wholesale and distribution details.