AltaPro AI
AltaPro AI
Wholesale, Distribution & Product Operations

You Know What Sold.
Not What It Earned.

Wholesalers, distributors, dealers and specialty publishers run on a catalog, prices that depend on who is asking, orders that arrive five different ways, and money owed out the other end. Most of that lives in a spreadsheet beside the accounting system. We build the layer that holds it properly — and we keep running it.

What this usually looks like

The Process Exists. It Lives In People.

The price depends on who is asking

Every account has its own negotiated pricing — tier, contract, volume break, an old letter nobody can find. The real price list lives in one person's spreadsheet and their memory, so quoting is a bottleneck and nobody else can cover it.

Orders arrive five different ways

Email, a PDF purchase order, a phone call, the web form, a distributor's portal, an EDI feed. Each one gets re-keyed by hand into the accounting system, which is where the typos, the duplicate orders and the missed lines come from.

Nobody can answer “where is my order” without asking someone

The status is real, it is just distributed across an inbox, a warehouse whiteboard and a shipping account. Answering a customer means interrupting two people, so the answer is slow and sometimes wrong.

Backorders and partial shipments are tracked by memory

A line ships, a line doesn’t, the rest is owed. What is actually outstanding across all open orders is a question the system cannot answer, so it gets answered by whoever has been there longest.

What you owe out is reconciled by hand

Channel fees, distributor statements, rep commissions, royalties. Each arrives on a different schedule in a different format, and somebody spends days a month matching them against what actually sold.

The catalog is in three places and they disagree

The website, the accounting system and the price list each hold a version of the same item. Changing a product means remembering all three, so one of them is always stale.

A reach truck carrying wrapped pallets down a numbered warehouse aisle
What we build

Catalog To Cash, On One Path.

Catalog and customer-specific pricing

One catalog record per item, with the pricing rules that actually apply to each account — tiers, contract rates, volume breaks, effective dates. Quoting stops depending on the one person who knows.

Multi-channel order intake

Orders from email, PDFs, the web, portals and feeds landing in one queue in one shape, with the document attached to the order rather than sitting in someone’s inbox. Structured extraction where the source is unstructured.

Fulfilment, backorders and partial shipments

What shipped, what is owed, what is allocated and what is genuinely outstanding across every open order — as a state the system holds rather than a thing people reconstruct.

Order-to-cash on one path

Order, confirmation, pick, ship, invoice, payment — one record carried the whole way with nothing re-entered between steps, and the accounting system fed rather than duplicated.

Channel, commission and royalty reconciliation

Statements from distributors, marketplaces and channel partners matched against your own sales records, with the exceptions surfaced instead of the whole file being checked line by line.

Integration with what you already run

QuickBooks or your ERP, the storefront, the shipping accounts, the warehouse. We integrate with the systems you keep rather than asking you to replace them.

Two warehouse staff walking a picking aisle, one holding a barcode scanner and one a clipboard
A narrow high-bay aisle with cases stacked to the roof on racking either side
Cartons stacked on pallets on a packing floor while staff move stock between benches
Where our proof actually is

Built In This Category.

We have built working software in this category — catalog, pricing and order mechanics for a specialty technical publisher, whose titles, standing orders, distributor statements and royalties are the same spine a parts distributor runs on. We describe clients rather than naming them, here and everywhere else on this site.

Behind that sits the production record the mechanics come from: structured pricing and document intake that took a demolition contractor's bid process from two to three hours down to minutes, and a single operations platform that replaced five systems for a general contractor working across Edmonton and Calgary. Both figures are client-reported. Warehouse automation and physical logistics are the honest edge of this — they are somebody else's scope, and we say so below.

Where the scope stops
  • We do not sell a warehouse management system, a WMS module or a rebadged ERP. This is custom software around the operation you actually run.
  • We do not run your warehouse or your fulfilment. We build the system your people run it on.
  • Physical automation — conveyors, robotics, pick-to-light, scanner hardware selection — is outside our scope. We integrate with what your hardware already emits.
  • We do not take over your accounting. The accounting system stays where it is and we feed it cleanly.
  • Rights, contracts and royalty terms are yours to set. We build the system that applies and reconciles them, not the legal position behind them.
Questions

Before You Book The Call.

We already have QuickBooks and a storefront. Why would we need anything else?

You probably don't need them replaced. What is usually missing is the layer between them — the place where a customer's real negotiated price lives, where an emailed PDF order becomes a structured order, and where what is owed on a backorder is a fact rather than a memory. That layer is what we build, and it feeds the systems you keep rather than competing with them.

Is this an ERP?

No. An ERP asks you to adopt its model of your business and then pays consultants to bend it back toward reality. We build around the operation you already run, you own what we build, and the scope stops at what earns its place. If a stock ERP genuinely fits your business, it is cheaper than we are and we will say so on the call.

Our pricing rules are genuinely complicated. Is that a problem?

That is usually the reason to build rather than buy. Off-the-shelf systems support the pricing models their vendor anticipated; the ones that don't fit end up as a spreadsheet beside the system, which is the situation you already have. Customer-specific pricing with tiers, contract rates, volume breaks and effective dates is a normal thing to model properly.

Does this work for a publisher or a business that isn't classic wholesale?

Yes, and we have built in it. A specialty publisher has a catalog of titles, standing orders from libraries and institutions, distributor statements to reconcile and royalties to pay out — the same spine as a parts distributor with SKUs, contract pricing, channel statements and rep commissions. We have built catalog, pricing and order software for exactly that shape of business. If yours runs on a catalog, orders arriving through several channels and money owed out the other end, this page is about you even if the nouns are different.

How do you handle orders that arrive as PDFs or emails?

Structured extraction into the same order shape as everything else, with the original document attached to the record. The extraction is checked rather than trusted — a person confirms before it becomes an order — because a silently wrong quantity is worse than a slow one.

What does it cost and how long does it take?

Scope drives both, and both get written into a scope agreement before work starts. The 30-minute call is where a real number and a real timeline get put on it. We build in phases so you see working software early rather than one launch months out.

Bring The Spreadsheet
Nobody Else Can Run.

Thirty minutes, no deck. Walk us through how an order gets from a customer to an invoice today, and where it stops being a system and starts being a person. We will tell you honestly whether that is worth building around.

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