Dairy
Dairy wholesale, where the round is daily and the window is hours
Dairy is the least forgiving category in distribution. Deliveries run most days of the week, the cut-off is measured in hours rather than days, every carton has a date on it, and a venue that misses the window does not wait for you. They buy milk from the supermarket at retail and you have lost the volume for the day.
The problems
What we hear from dairy distributors
Standing orders that genuinely stand
Most dairy volume is the same this week as it was last week, so it should not be re-entered every week. Recurring orders place themselves on the schedule you set, and a venue adjusts the one day that is different rather than keying the other five.
Runs, not postcodes
Orders group by the named delivery run that actually carries them, so what comes out of the back office in the morning matches how the truck is loaded rather than how the customer list happens to be sorted.
The calendar decides everything
Public holidays are recorded once and shift cut-off and delivery days for every account at the same time, so nobody is working from a different version of the week. Showing a buyer their own next delivery date, worked out from their run, is in development rather than shipped.
Crates, multiples and a ceiling on the mistake
Milk leaves in crates and cases, not in ones. Products can be restricted to the multiples you actually pick, and any line can carry a maximum, so a mistyped quantity at 4am does not quietly consume the morning's stock.
Short-dated stock and credits, said plainly
Dairy generates more credits than any other category, and you should ask every vendor how they handle them. Ours is not finished: returns and credits are in development, with orders, returns and invoices being modelled as distinct transactions, and until that ships credits are reconciled outside the platform. If that is the centre of your problem rather than the edge of it, tell us before you buy and not after.
What matters most here
The parts of Carrots this category leans on
The whole platform is included either way. These are simply the modules that do the heavy lifting in your category.