Industry · Food, grocery and beverage
Netolyst DMS keeps an expiry date on every consignment, a real cost on every carton, and the shop’s account behind both. So stock goes out while it still has value, and your profit is the figure it really was.
Everything on this page is part of Netolyst DMS — the same system that takes your booker’s order, makes the bill, keeps the shop khata and writes your accounts. There is no food-only version and no expiry module sold on its own. In a food house the date and the money are the same question: the bill is what takes the carton off your shelf, the goods receipt is what gave that carton its date and its cost, and your accounts read from both.
If you want to see the whole business and not only the food side of it, start with the full list of what it does and come back here for the detail that matters to a grocery, beverage or general food line.
Why food is different
Two things change in a food line, and both of them cost money. The first is time: a carton on your floor is worth something today and worth nothing in four months. The second is price: the cost of a food line moves. Sugar moves. Oil moves. Rice moves with the season.
The carton you bought in June and the carton you bought in September did not cost the same. If your software averages them into one number, your profit figure is a guess. And if it keeps one expiry date per product instead of one per consignment, it cannot tell you which cartons to push into the market first.
Netolyst DMS holds both. Every consignment keeps its own expiry date and its own cost, and is never mixed with another one. A consignment is called a lot, or a batch — one load of one product, received on one paper, with its own quantity, its own cost, its own selling rate and its own date.
That is the shape of this page: what the date does for you, what the real cost does for you, and what the two together let you see about a catalogue of food lines. The stock machinery underneath all of it — goods receipts, transfers, counts and adjustments — is explained in full under inventory management, and the selling side under sales management.
The problem
You already know these. They are worth writing down anyway, because software that does not name them usually does not solve them.
Nobody saw it. It was on the floor, it was in the total, and then one day somebody found it. Now it is a claim on the company that you may or may not recover.
The old stock sat behind the new stock, on the floor and in the register, and went out only when the new stock ran out.
Because the cost the system used was an average of two loads bought at two different rates, and the freight never went into the carton at all.
Returned food does not go back on the shelf. It goes to the damage room, and it needs to be a separate number that somebody can still build a claim from.
He wants opening, received, sold, returned and closing, in cartons. Somebody builds it in Excel the night before, and nobody can defend it line by line.
Expiry
When goods come in, the lot gets its expiry date. That date stays with it for the whole life of the stock — in the godown, on the bill line and in the reports. It is not a note somebody typed beside the product name.
The date is entered once, on the goods receipt that brought the consignment in. How that receipt works, and what else it carries, is on the batches and cost section of the inventory page.
Cost
Each lot keeps the cost you actually paid for it, and its own selling rate. Two consignments of the same product are two lots, and they are never averaged into one figure — because in a food line they never were one figure.
Freight, quarantined goods and a company bill whose total does not agree with its own rows are all handled at goods receipt. What the bill then does with these lots is on the invoicing page.
Godowns and condition
Stock is held by lot, by godown and by condition — saleable, damaged, expired, or waiting on a bill. Only saleable stock can go on a bill, so a damaged carton can never quietly increase what your counter is allowed to promise.
Transfers between rooms, blind counting and the approval a difference needs are covered under godowns and conditions. What a return does to the shop’s account is under sales returns.
Weights
Quantities are held to three decimal places. So a line sold by weight behaves properly, and 1.250 kg stays 1.250 kg instead of becoming a piece count somebody rounded at the counter. Loose grocery lines, bulk rice and bulk oil can be billed the way they are actually weighed out.
There is no connection to a weighing scale. The weight is read off the scale and typed.
Example
A worked example using the documents that really exist in the product. Nothing is typed twice, and every step leaves the record the next step reads.
Sixty cartons of one-litre oil come off the truck. You type the company’s bill as it reads: quantities, the company rate, your own selling price, and the tax columns printed on the paper.
The lot number and the expiry date go on the same line. From this moment the date travels with those sixty cartons everywhere they go, and nobody has to remember it.
Bilty and unloading are spread across the lines by value. The carton’s cost is now what the carton really cost, so the margin you are shown later is the margin you actually earn.
This product carries its own warning window, set by you. Nothing happens today. The lot simply appears on the expiring list when it reaches that point, while it still has value in the market.
He takes the order on his round with no signal at all. The order holds no stock and carries no price. It carries an order number your office can quote back the same minute.
Eight cartons come off an older lot and four off this one. So the bill carries two lines, with two lot codes, two expiry dates and two rates, and the shop’s khata is debited for the whole of it.
A sales return credits the shop’s khata for those two cartons, and they land in the damage room, where they stay countable for your claim on the company.
The rest of the consignment stays visible with its date on it. The month’s profit reads the real cost of the cartons that sold, freight included, without anybody rebuilding it.
The carton counted off the truck in step one is the same carton on the bill in step six, and the same rupees on your profit page in step eight. Nobody enters it a second time, so nobody can enter it wrong.
Reports
Per-product reports answer the question a food distributor actually asks every week: what is moving, and what is not.
This is a screen from the running product, captured on a demonstration business. The company names and figures in it are demonstration data, not a customer’s books.
Connected
Everything above sits inside one system, beside the parts of your business that move the same cartons and the same rupees. Each of these has a page of its own.
Your booker walks his route with an Android phone: his shops in walking order, what each one owes, and what each one bought last time. It works with no signal. Orders wait on the phone until he taps Send, and nothing arrives twice.
The bill is the only document that takes saleable stock off your shelf, and it takes it lot by lot. It cannot be edited once posted: a wrong bill is voided and made again, and the original stays on the record.
A running account per shop, where rows are added and never edited. Money arrives the way it really arrives — one round figure, against no particular bill — and is spread across the open bills, oldest first.
The aging ladder — not due, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, over 90 days — built from what is left on each bill. Every shop carries a credit limit, credit days and a cap on open bills, and can be marked cash-only.
A scheme letter is typed in once from the paper, and after that the bill applies it by itself. The free carton comes off the same lot the paid cartons came from, and a return takes the free goods back with it.
Every money document writes its own accounting as it posts. Nobody types a voucher. Profit reads sales, minus returns, minus what the goods really cost — with every loss on its own line.
Each of those has a page of its own: the round and the order, the godown and the lots, the bill itself, the shop khata and what the market owes, and the books it all writes into. If you hold the agency of several companies at once and want to read about that side of it — a catalogue split by company, a stock-and-sale statement per principal, and each company’s own outstanding list — that is covered on FMCG distribution.
Limits
The fastest way to waste your time and ours is a demonstration that ends on something the product was never built to do. Here are the boundaries, before a conversation instead of after one.
Pricing and the 14-day free trial are the same for every part of the product. They are explained on the Netolyst DMS pricing page.
Terms
These are the trade words used above, in the meaning the product gives them.
Food distribution software is the system a food, grocery or beverage distributor uses to run his whole business: what is in the godown, what each consignment cost, when each consignment expires, what every shop owes, and what the month actually made. It differs from ordinary stock software in two ways. It keeps an expiry date on every consignment rather than one date per product, and it keeps the cost of each consignment separate instead of averaging them, because the cost of a food line changes with almost every load. Netolyst DMS is a distributor management system of this kind, built for distribution houses in Pakistan.
Yes. Once a lot is past its expiry date it cannot go on a bill at all. It is still counted and still visible, so it has not disappeared from your stock, but the selling side will not take it. That is a rule inside the product, not a warning message somebody can click past.
Yes. The warning window is set per product, and any product that does not set one uses the house default. This exists precisely because one number for the whole catalogue is useless. A sack of rice and a carton of yoghurt drink do not need the same notice.
No, and that is deliberate. Each consignment is its own lot with its own cost and its own selling rate, and two lots of the same product are never blended into one cost. Freight, bilty and unloading go into the cost of the carton at the goods receipt, so the figure your profit page reads is the real landed cost.
No. There is no temperature recording, no temperature alert, no cold-room monitoring and no connection to any sensor or logger. If your business depends on proving that a temperature was held, this software has nothing to offer on that part of it, and a demonstration will not change that.
No. It picks the lot that arrived first, which is normal Pakistani trade practice. Expiry is still fully tracked and expired stock cannot be sold at all. In most food lines the oldest lot is also the lot closest to its date. Where the two are not the same, the near-expiry report tells you, and a person decides which lot to send.
They come back against the bill they went out on, at the exact lots they left on, and land in whichever godown and condition you say — usually the damage room. The shop’s khata is credited for the returned value. Nothing goes back onto the saleable shelf unless you put it there. If those cartons had earned free goods under a company scheme, the return takes the free goods back with them.
Yes. Stock is held by lot, by godown and by condition — saleable, damaged, expired or waiting on a bill — and only saleable stock can go on a bill. The damage room is a real separate place in the software because it is a real separate room in your building. Goods move into it on a document with a reason, and move back out the same way if they are re-graded.
Yes. Quantities carry three decimal places, so kilos and grams behave properly and 1.250 kg stays 1.250 kg. The weight is typed, though. There is no connection to a weighing scale.
He carries an Android phone with his shops in walking order, what each one owes, what each one bought last time, and the catalogue. It works with no signal at all. Orders wait on the phone until he taps Send, nothing is lost if the app is killed or the phone restarts, and nothing arrives twice if the network drops part-way through sending. Every figure on his screen shows how old it is.
Yes. The catalogue is split by company, the same product held under two companies is two separate items, and each company gets its own stock-and-sale statement and its own list of what is outstanding in the market. Stock can sit together in one godown physically while reporting separately.
No. The khata is inside the product and the accounting writes itself as each document posts. Nobody types a voucher and nothing is exported to a second program. The profit page, the balance sheet and the cash flow all come out of the same transactions.
No. The bill is cut at your office. There is no van stock, no load sheet and no app for the supplyman at the door. A bill can record that it was paid in cash at the moment it is entered, but the delivery run itself is not managed here.
No price is published, because none is set. The shape is decided: one product with everything in it, priced in rupees for a term you choose, with no tiers. A 14-day free trial exists and you can start it yourself.
Talk to us
Tell us how many shops you sell to, how many companies you carry, and how much goes to the damage room in a normal month. You will hear back from the people who built it.
Built for a food, grocery or beverage distribution house in Pakistan, billing in rupees. Not for cold-chain operations that must prove a temperature, and not for ready-stock van selling.