The days of relying on paper systems is over! The Food and Beverage Distribution industry is continuing to change. The way distributors ran their business 10 years ago is much different to the way they run it now. With the rise of technology, there are many tools available that automate the common time-consuming administration tasks and open your doors for greater growth.
One of the biggest challenges in the Food and Beverage industry is time. Many businesses struggle to find the time to take orders, chase payments, and deliver a product. If you find yourself doing common administration tasks, you will often find that another area suffers. This is where Automation helps.
Before we get started on the 5 tasks that Food distributors MUST automate, it’s important to know what automation is and how it can improve your businesses processes.
What is Automation?
Automation is an algorithm that is programmed to achieve business outcomes with minimal to no human input. Automation removes repetitive manual tasks, increases your efficiency and reduces your costs.
Here are 5 tasks every food distributor MUST automate in 2021:
1. Taking Orders
If you still find yourself taking orders via SMS or Email, you will already know how time-consuming that process is. As a food distributor, time is your number one priority. Your ordering process shouldn’t be complicated or better yet take you away from the more important tasks such as order fulfilment.
Using a Food and Beverage management software like EasyVend, you can automate your entire ordering process. Instead of customers calling, texting, or emailing to place their orders, they will now place orders on an online ordering e-commerce website. Once an order is placed, the software will automatically generate an invoice, update your stock levels, send a receipt, and assign a job for your team to complete – no keying in data, no manual tasks!
2. Receiving Payments
How long do you spend chasing payments? Recent data released showed Australian Food and Beverage Distribution businesses wait 28 days on average for payment. Your payment process should be simple, you shouldn’t have to hire someone to chase customers for payments.
A Food and Beverage management system can also help you with this frustrating manual task. EasyVend includes an Automatic Credit Card Payment Solution that automates your entire process from invoicing to receipting.
The benefit of automating your credit card payments is, payment is taken automatically at the agreed time, are instantly allocated and receipted to the correct invoice and invoices are sent automatically at the correct interval.
3. Invoicing
One repetitive task that many SMEs continue to do manually is Invoicing. The good news is invoicing is super easy to automate. Let’s face it you just don’t have the time to manually generate invoices to your customers, you have more important things to do. There are tools available that help you automate invoicing.
The most popular tools include Xero accounting and MYOB. Both applications can automatically create unique business specific invoices and send them to customer inboxes for payment.
Related Article: Automatic Credit Card Payments with EasyVend.
4. Stock Management
The days of using a spreadsheet for stock management is over. One of the biggest problems with doing stock take manually is there is a high risk of error. Making one little mistake can cause chaos and take hours to fix.
Using a food and beverage management software you can automate your entire stock take and generate live reports whenever you choose. The benefit of an using a food and beverage management system for stock is your stock numbers will automatically update as you buy and sell – you don’t need to key in any data!
5. Customer Reminders
Notifying customers to place their orders is a common manual task that many distributors do daily. If you are one of the few still manually reminding customers, you would already know the pain. A Food and Beverage management system like EasyVend gives you the ability to automate your entire customer reminder process.
Customer reminders can be triggered to send automatically to customers who have failed to place an order at their regular interval without you needing to do anything. No manual phone calls or text messages!
About EasyVend
For food and beverage vendors and distributors, EasyVend supports and automates every part of your business, freeing you up to grow your sales unlike other ERP systems that are designed more for wholesale suppliers than for distribution businesses like yours.
EasyVend includes all your everyday needs like Inventory Management, Online Ordering, Invoicing, Receipting, Route Management, Automatic Credit Card Payments, Customer Reminders, Xero Integration and so much more.
Call us today on 1300 473 744 to see what sets us apart or submit the form below for a free no-obligation demo of EasyVend.