Buyer’s guide
Inventory management built for distributors, not warehouses
An audited stock ledger, low-stock alerts, and CSV-first workflows — without the overhead of a full WMS.
What to know about inventory management for distributors
Inventory management for distributors sits between 'spreadsheets' and 'full WMS.' You don't need batch/lot tracking or wave picking — you need to know, confidently, how many units you have, who moved them last, and when something will dip below the threshold that makes your biggest customer unhappy.
The right tool at this scale trades WMS depth for clarity and auditability. If you're constantly explaining count discrepancies to finance or discovering oversells on Monday morning, the gap isn't features — it's a ledger.
Evaluating tools
What to look for
Ask these of every tool in your shortlist — including ours.
- 1
Every stock change leaves a row
Orders, returns, refunds, manual adjustments, CSV imports — all of them should write an attributed, timestamped row to a stock-movement ledger. If stock is a single integer that just goes up and down, you don't have inventory management; you have a counter.
- 2
Low-stock thresholds trigger a notification, not a quarterly review
By the time a human notices a stockout, it's already a missed order. Set per-SKU thresholds and have the platform fan out a notification (in-app, email, Slack) the moment stock crosses them.
- 3
CSV import and export are first-class
You will onboard from a spreadsheet and you will hand data to an accountant. Row-level validation errors, idempotent imports, and exports that round-trip cleanly are worth more than any dashboard screenshot.
- 4
Reporting serves finance, not just ops
Inventory valuation, weighted-average cost, movement by SKU — these are the reports your bookkeeper asks for at close. They should be scheduled and emailed, not built ad-hoc every quarter.
- 5
The inventory model is the order model
Inventory that lives in one tool and orders that live in another means every integration is a sync job. Picking one platform that handles both atomically is the difference between a clean month-end and a reconciliation marathon.
How Distribu handles it
What you get on day one
An audited stock-movement ledger
Every adjustment — new orders, returns, manual edits, CSV imports — lands in a stock-history row with actor, timestamp, and reason. Finance and production close the books from the same data, and a missing unit always has a row to explain it.
Inventory docs →Per-SKU low-stock thresholds with in-app + email alerts
Set a threshold per product; the moment stock drops below it, Distribu fans out a notification to the dashboard bell and (optionally) email. No one has to open the inventory page to catch it.
Low-stock docs →CSV import with row-level validation
Bulk-upload products (name, SKU, price, stock) or customers. Distribu validates every row, returns inline errors for the ones that fail, and imports the rest — so a bad row doesn't block the other 500. Exports round-trip cleanly.
CSV docs →Scheduled reports and low-stock alerts
Sales, customer-spend, and inventory-valuation reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence, delivered by email to whoever needs them. Low-stock thresholds fan out an in-app notification the moment a SKU dips — no one has to babysit the dashboard.
Reports docs →Inventory and orders in one system
An order placed anywhere — portal, dashboard, API — decrements stock atomically in the same database. A return received updates the ledger in the same transaction as the refund. No sync job, no drift.
Feature tour →Frequently asked
Do distributors need a WMS?
Only if warehouse operations are a meaningful fraction of your cost — multi-warehouse picking, wave planning, bin-level tracking. For most distributors under 10,000 SKUs at a single location, an inventory module inside a distribution platform is more than enough and a lot faster to operate.
What's a stock-movement ledger and why do I care?
A stock-movement ledger is a table of every change to a SKU's quantity — attributed to an actor and a reason (order #123, return #45, manual adjustment by Sarah). When finance asks why a SKU moved, you have a row, not a guess. It's the difference between 'we think' and 'we know.'
Can I run inventory in Distribu while keeping orders somewhere else?
Technically yes, via the API, but most teams don't — the whole point of a single system is that the stock ledger and the order queue share a transaction. If you must keep orders elsewhere, Distribu can subscribe to webhooks and write adjustments back, but you lose atomicity.
What about multi-warehouse support?
Today Distribu supports one location per tenant. Multi-warehouse is on the near-term roadmap. If you have multiple locations and need it today, Cin7 Core is a solid pick — we integrate with it so you can run Cin7 for stock and Distribu for orders and the customer portal.
How does inventory valuation work?
Distribu stores per-SKU cost and computes inventory valuation (weighted-average cost × on-hand quantity) on demand. The valuation report can be scheduled to email your bookkeeper monthly, so the close never waits on a fresh export.
See it in your own tenant
14-day trial, no credit card. Or walk through it with us first — 20 minutes, your catalog, your questions.
Built for
Built for
Wholesale distributors
Per-buyer price lists, credit limits, and one shared order queue. Your reps, your ops team, and your customers all look at the same record.
Built for
Small manufacturers
Audited stock movements so finance and production read from the same ledger. Webhooks so your ERP and MRP stay in sync without brittle CSV cron jobs.