In distribution, a beat is the round a salesman covers. Beatplan computes that round every morning from the invoices you already produce: who each person sees today, why they are on the list, and what they may sell them. No pipeline. No stages. No deals to update.
No order for 7 weeks. Usually orders every 12 days.
Usually buys: flour, yeast, packagingPromised payment last Friday. Nothing received.
60 days overdueOrdered sugar monthly for two years. Nothing since March.
Do not offer Sunflower Oil 5L — we are shortThe actual screen your salesman opens. No dashboard, no search box.
The problem
Somebody drew up the rounds once. Since then customers changed how often they order, three went quiet, two started buying twice as much, and the plan did not move. Everyone still works the same list, in the same order, on the same day of the week.
The customer who slipped from fortnightly to never is still on Thursday's list, getting the same visit as everyone else, telling nobody anything.
It holds the stock, the costs, the expiry dates and every invoice ever raised. It has never once told a salesman who to see this morning.
Nobody announces they are leaving. They order less, then not at all. Without something watching, you find out a year later in the annual figures.
Let us be blunt
People assume it must be, because it knows your customers. It is worth being exact about the difference, because it changes what you have to do to get value out of it.
It is a system of record. It is empty until your people fill it, and it is only as true as their typing. You already have a system of record: it is the one that raises your invoices.
It is a system of action. It reads records that already exist and issues a plan. The output is not a report you interpret, it is a list of names in the order they should be worked.
What you will not find in it:
No pipeline. No deal stages, because you do not have deals, you have customers who either order or stop. No opportunity forms, no lead scoring, no forecast to massage before the Monday meeting. Nothing that has to be filled in before the software becomes useful, because the day it is installed it already knows four years of what everybody bought.
How it works
Invoices get entered whether or not anyone likes software, because that is how you get paid. That makes them the only complete record in the building, and it is enough to work out who belongs on today's round.
Export customers, products and past invoices from whatever you run now. Beatplan reads the column headings, shows you what it understood, and lets you correct it before saving. Or we connect it directly to your system and you export nothing at all.
Not one rule for everybody. A bakery ordering every 12 days and a hotel ordering quarterly are both normal. Each customer is measured against their own pattern.
Sales get calls. Admin get chases and promises. Directors get the numbers. All before the day starts, by email and in the app, online or not.
Why it is different
A route list printed on Monday will send your salesman to push a product that is out of stock, three weeks from expiry, or priced below what you paid for it, because paper knows nothing about your warehouse. Beatplan holds the round and the stock together, so it can refuse.
Anything flagged as short is barred from every push list. Winning an order you cannot fill costs more than the order was worth.
Push lists name the batch, not just the product, so the pallet expiring in March goes before the one that arrived last week.
A packet price entered against a case, a stale cost after a currency move. It surfaces the day it happens instead of at the year end.
Goods already invoiced and awaiting collection are held, so the same units cannot be promised to two customers.
Discounts stay the owner's decision. Beatplan never invents one.
What it does
Most teams start with the call list and find that the rest of the company wants in. Each role sees its own version, with its own numbers and its own permissions.
Contacts, history, what they buy, what they owe, every call ever logged, in one place instead of five.
Who owes what, how old it is, who promised what and when. Logged in one tap from the same screen as the call.
Propose a route, get it approved, and the trip stays open until the report is filed. No more journeys nobody can account for.
A salesman speaks for thirty seconds at the roadside. It comes back as a structured, filed report. Nobody types in a vehicle.
Daily briefing, weekly plan and a monthly review for directors: revenue against the same month last year, who grew, who declined, how the debtor book is ageing.
What is near expiry, what is dead, what is tied up, valued at what you paid for it rather than what you hoped to sell it for.
What to buy before you run out, based on how fast each line actually sells, with an order sheet ready to send to your supplier.
"Which customers in the north have stopped buying rice?" Plain language, answered from your own data, with no report to build.
Warehouse, purchasing, finance, service. Same engine, different queue. If a job has a rhythm and somebody must notice when it slips, it fits.
Scenarios
Illustrative examples rather than named customers, drawn from the patterns that repeat across distribution businesses everywhere. Find the one that sounds like yours.
Restaurants and small manufacturers, each on a different cycle. The good accounts get visited; the quiet ones are never noticed until they are gone.
Every account measured against its own rhythm, not one blanket rule.
Short-dated stock has to move first, and a batch reaching its date is money burned. The stock report and the sales team live in different worlds.
Push lists name the batch, oldest first, and refuse anything already reserved.
Costs move with the exchange rate, price lists lag behind, and nobody notices a line is being sold under cost until the year-end accounts.
An alarm the day a selling price drops below average cost.
Reps cover long routes with no reliable connection, so anything requiring a live connection is abandoned within a fortnight.
Full offline working, and voice notes instead of typing.
Everything sells on terms. The debtor book ages faster than anyone tracks, and promises to pay are remembered by whoever took the call.
Debtors, ageing and promises recorded on the same screen as the call.
A capable accounts system holds everything and answers nothing a salesman needs. A second full system is out of the question.
Reads the existing system, replaces nothing, and works from day one.
Where it was built
A warehouse, a sales team on the road, and four years of invoice history sitting in an accounts package. Beatplan was built alongside them, against a real book of 231 customers and 729 products. Here is what the first look found, before anyone had logged a single call.
products selling below what they cost to buy, one at a sixth of its own cost price
of dead and slow-moving stock identified, money already spent and sitting still
of warehouse fixtures booked as sellable stock, quietly inflating the figures
buying-history records turned into a daily call list, with nothing typed by hand
Customisation and connections
Every distributor has one thing they do differently, and it is usually the thing that makes them money. Off-the-shelf software asks you to give it up. We would rather build it.
Your accounts package, your stock system, your database. We build the connection so your data flows in on its own and nobody exports a spreadsheet again.
A screen your operation needs, a rule only your trade has, a report your bank asks for. Small, quoted up front, and a fraction of what an enterprise vendor charges to say no.
Prefer your own developers? They get access to build against it directly. It is your data and your business, and we are not interested in holding either hostage.
Pricing
Putting your whole team on it costs nothing extra, because a system half your team uses tells you half the truth. Paying yearly costs ten months instead of twelve.
One salesman and an office
Up to 5 people
A team on the road
Up to 20 people
Several branches
Unlimited people
Per-seat pricing is what makes business software expensive, and what quietly keeps half your team off it.
| Approach | 20 people | Whole team on it? |
|---|---|---|
| Per-seat software at $25 a seat | $500 / month | Only the ones you pay for |
| Per-seat software at $75 a seat | $1,500 / month | Only the ones you pay for |
| Beatplan Business | $79 / month | Everybody |
Prices in US dollars. Invoiced by MRX Consulting OÜ, Estonia. Local invoicing and mobile money available in some markets, ask us.
Questions
No, and you should not. Sage, QuickBooks, Odoo, SAP or whatever you run stays exactly where it is and remains the record of truth. Beatplan reads from it and tells your team what to do. It never writes back.
As long as it takes to export three spreadsheets, or nothing at all if we connect your system directly. Once your customers and invoice history are in, the call list is there the same day, because it is calculated from history rather than built up from new activity.
Not one. A CRM is a place to record what happened, and it is empty until your team fills it in. Beatplan issues the plan for the day, calculated from invoices that already exist. There is no pipeline, no deal stages and no forecast. If you want a system of record you already have one, and we read from it rather than replacing it.
That is the correct thing to worry about, and it is why the main screen is a list of names and reasons rather than a dashboard. There is nothing to fill in before it works, and a salesman can file a report by speaking for thirty seconds instead of typing. If your team logs nothing at all, it still tells you who has gone quiet, because that comes from the invoices.
Everything keeps working. The list is on the phone, calls and orders are saved on the phone, and it syncs when a connection comes back. It was built for people who spend the day in a vehicle.
Usually yes, and that is the point of the customisation service. Tell us the rule, the screen or the report and we will quote it. If you would rather your own developers built it, they can work against the system directly.
Yes, and it is enforced by the database itself rather than by application code, with an automated suite that tries to break the separation on every single change. Each company can also have its own web address and its own branding.
No. Sales is where most teams start. The same engine runs operations, purchasing, credit control and service, because the underlying question is always the same: what has slipped, who owns it, and what should happen today.
Load your history and see the call list your own data produces. If it does not show you something about your own business that you did not already know, it is not for you.