[Toby S]

Dear Sir,
I am The Managing Director of a small food distribution company based in Ireland. I am in need of a software system that can provide me with a full accounting and traceability system for my business.
The business is the importation and distribution of Mediterranean foods. We also have a small manufacturing dimension where we make some sauces and dips. The business is based in two locations, Cork and Dublin.
The business is divided into two companies, one that imports and manufactures and sells to a handful of clients that are affiliated with the business and the other company that specialises in distribution to shops and restaurants. The distribution company buys from the import business.
I would like to join the two companies together in a software package that deals with the traceability and can report on the various activities of the two companies.

My wish list is quite simple;
It must be cloud
It must have a full accounts package that does statements.
It must have flexible price lists and the allocation of special prices for customers.
The customers must be able to be categorised or grouped for report purposes.
The customers must be able to have discounts assigned to them.
The invoices and statements must be able to be emailed simply, preferably with a "email" button, rather than saving as a pdf and attaching.
The invoices should be able to show the profit margin as they are being compiled (obviously not available to the customer)
It must do traceability and stock control and be able to differentiate between two locations of stock.
It must integrate with a bar code programme, such as "bartender", to create barcodes and to read them.
It must be able to do product recall in the event of a problem.
I would appreciate if you could give me an idea if this is possible, and what kind of price it would be. I am a small company that employs around five people.

[COBS Tech Support]

I think we do everything on your list and do it really well. The only things I can see as possible issues is that we are an Australian software company, so I am not familiar with how suitable our package would be for your region.

The other point is that our software is Windows based so runs on Windows OS and not "the cloud". If you wanted remote access to your data from outside your business you would need to utilise a Microsoft technology such as Terminal Services.

Barcode printing is built in, as is batch and serial number tracing, and generation and emailing of PDF's is done in one step. The system has a very sophisticated special pricing system and is fully multi-location aware.

It also does multiple units of measure which is sometimes handy in the food distribution industry, i.e., units, cartons, cases, dozens, and does conversions between these different units and can track different pricing arrangements for different units and so on.

If you have your own vehicles for distribution than you can go with zone management, run sheets, etc., for working on what goods go on what delivery runs and so on.

The minimum components you need which covers all of the above except zone management is:

Professional Edition 5 User
Electronic Document Exchange
General Ledger
Stock Tracing Extensions

Pricing can be found on our website.