Two systems, one set of numbers

Stock and prices lived in an accounting system finance would not leave, and a storefront that could not see it. Staff re-typed both, daily.

What the business looked like before

Two screens, one truth, and a person in between. Someone read stock levels out of the accounting system and typed them into the store. Someone else read paid orders out of the store and typed them back as invoices.

It worked, in the way that manual reconciliation always works: until the day it does not. Oversells when stock moved faster than the typing. Prices that were right in one place and stale in the other. And at month end, a disagreement between two systems that nobody could resolve without going back through the day.

The constraint that shaped the work

Finance was not moving off the accounting system, and they were right not to: it was the legal record, the auditors knew it, and the cost of migrating it had nothing to do with the problem being solved.

So the accounting system was treated as immovable. Not replaced, not modified, not asked to change its habits. Everything adapted around it.

What changed

Stock and prices flow out to the storefront on their own. Paid orders flow back and become invoices in the ledger. Nobody re-types anything.

The part that mattered more than the automation: when the connection between the two fails — and connections fail — the system knows it failed, retries, and says so. A silent failure that leaves two systems quietly disagreeing is worse than no automation at all, because the disagreement is then invisible.

What I would tell another distributor

The temptation is to solve this by replacing the old system. That is the expensive answer to the wrong question. The problem was never the accounting package. It was that nothing connected it to where the selling happened.