Electrical wholesaler EPOS software

What makes electrical wholesaling different

A counter in an electrical wholesaler is not serving shoppers. It is serving electricians who are on a job, usually behind schedule, and who buy the same forty lines over and over. They have an account, they have a discount structure that was agreed at some point in the past, and they expect the person serving them to know both without asking.

That produces three requirements that most off-the-shelf point of sale software simply does not have. The price a customer pays is a calculation rather than a label. Credit is a live constraint that has to be enforced at the moment of sale rather than discovered at month end. And stock is measured in more than one unit at once — a 100-metre drum of twin and earth is a single stock item until somebody wants eighteen metres of it.

PlanIt EPOS is built around those three facts rather than having them retro-fitted. Everything below follows from them.

Contract pricing that resolves itself

In PlanIt EPOS, price resolution follows a fixed and predictable order. A customer-specific contract price wins if one exists for that product. Failing that, the trade band the account sits on is applied — band A, band B, and so on, each with its own discount off list, by product group where you need that granularity. Failing that, the customer pays list.

The important part is that this happens as the line is added, not after. The person on the counter scans a socket and sees the price that customer has been promised. There is no lookup, no laminated sheet under the desk, and no risk of a new starter quoting list to a customer who has been on band A for six years.

Discounting at the point of sale

You can still discount a line or a whole order at the till when the situation calls for it. What changes is that the effect is visible: the margin on the sale updates as the discount is applied, so the decision is made with the number in front of you rather than found in a report next month.

Quantity breaks

Products can carry quantity breaks so a box of fifty prices differently from five loose. Breaks and band pricing work together rather than fighting each other, and the resolved price is always shown with the reason it was applied.

Trade accounts and credit control

Every account carries terms, a credit limit and a live balance. When a sale is put on account, the limit is checked as part of ringing it through. If the sale would take the customer past their limit, the till says so, shows the shortfall, and stops.

A user with the right permission can override that and release the goods anyway — because sometimes you will, and pretending otherwise just means staff find a workaround. The difference is that the override is recorded against the sale and the user who authorised it, so it appears in reporting rather than in nobody’s memory.

• Aged balances at current, 30, 60 and 90+ days
• Payments allocated against specific invoices rather than swept against the oldest
• Statements produced and emailed on a schedule or on demand
• Credit notes raised with a reason recorded against them
• A customer portal where account customers can see their own invoices and statements

Cable, drums and cut lengths

Cable is the classic case that breaks simple stock models. You buy a 100-metre drum. You sell 18 metres to one customer, 40 to another, and eventually you have a part drum that the system insists is a whole one.

PlanIt EPOS handles this by letting a product be stocked in one unit and sold in another, with the stock ledger reduced by what was actually taken. A cut length can carry its own barcode and price, and the remaining quantity on the drum stays accurate. When you come to count, the figure on the screen is one you can defend.

The same mechanism covers conduit and trunking sold in lengths, and anything else where the purchase unit and the sale unit are not the same thing.

Quotes, deliveries and supplier ordering

Quotations

A quote is built at the customer’s own pricing, sent as a PDF, and converted to a sales order when it is accepted — with every line and price carried across rather than retyped. Quotes that go quiet stay visible, so a follow-up is a task rather than a good intention.

Deliveries

Lines on the same order can be split between collection and delivery. Delivery lines are scheduled onto a date, picked against a list, and signed for, so a query about what actually arrived on site has an answer.

Supplier ordering

Purchase orders are raised against real demand — the last four weeks of sales, the supplier’s lead time and the cover you want to hold. Deliveries are booked in against the order, including partial deliveries, so the outstanding quantity is always right and stock goes up when the goods physically arrive rather than when the order was placed.

Importing manufacturer and wholesaler price files

Electrical is a trade where costs move constantly and the files that carry those changes arrive in whatever format the supplier felt like sending. PlanIt EPOS imports CSV and Excel, and reads price lists directly from PDF.

Extracted rows are matched against your catalogue in a fixed order — barcode, then supplier code, then your own code, then a fuzzy match on description — and every row lands in a review inbox with a confidence score. You accept the high-confidence matches in bulk, correct anything that is wrong, and apply. Costs and margins only move at that point.

Working when the connection does not

Wholesalers are often on trading estates with unreliable broadband, and a till that stops when the line drops costs you the busiest hour of the day. PlanIt EPOS holds products, prices and customer records on the device, so sales carry on being rung through, priced correctly and receipted with no connection at all.

Queued sales synchronise automatically when the line returns. Each one carries its own identifier so it can never post twice, and invoice numbers are assigned by the server on sync so the sequence stays gapless.

What it costs and how you move

PlanIt EPOS is a monthly subscription priced on the tills, branches and users you need — not a percentage of turnover, and not a multi-year contract. Onboarding, data import and staff training are included.

Moving from an existing system usually starts with an export of products and customers to CSV, followed by a supplier price file to establish costs. Most of the work is deciding what to leave behind. Counter staff are typically serving confidently within a morning, because the screens are built around scanning and searching rather than function keys.