Promise what the warehouse can keep.
Order-to-cash wired straight into bins, lots and credit limits.
Most order screens take the order and hope. KSN Sales allocates against real bin and lot inventory at entry, enforces credit policy at confirm, and hands the warehouse a pick it can actually complete. From quote to order to shipment to return, every promise is checked against stock before a customer hears it.
- Order entry with live allocation against bins and lots
- Credit holds and limit checks enforced at confirm, not at month end
- Backorders with priority ranking and batch auto-allocation
- Full RMA lifecycle — refund, replacement or credit
- Quotes, bids and offers with margin-based auto-decisions on Enterprise
What's included
The full demand side of a distribution business — entry, governance, allocation, fulfillment, returns and the numbers your reps actually check.
Order entry & governance
Orders that are correct when they're confirmed, not corrected after they ship.
- One order pipeline, every channel. Rep-entered, call center, webstore, EDI and marketplace orders land in the same pipeline with the same rules — no side system for online orders to drift in.
- Customer auto-fill. Picking the customer pulls their terms, tax status, addresses and pricing into the order, so a new CSR can't quote last year's price to this year's account.
- Pre-confirm validation. Credit hold, required PO number, warehouse, and min/max/step quantities are checked before confirm — the order that can't ship never gets promised.
- Credit limit enforcement. An account over its limit stops at confirm with a named reason, instead of surfacing as a surprise in collections sixty days later.
- Hold and release. Any confirmed order can be held and released with a full audit trail, so a payment question pauses one order — not your relationship with the warehouse.
- Compound tax, recalculated on demand. Multi-jurisdiction compound tax and exemption certificates are computed by the engine, killing the hand-edited tax line that fails the audit.
Allocation & promise dates
The engine that decides what you can actually commit.
- Bin- and lot-level reservation. Allocation reserves specific units in specific bins and lots, so two orders can never both be promised the same last case.
- Profile-aware allocation. Customer lot rules and shelf-life requirements steer which lots a customer can receive — the account that demands 12 months of dating never gets 4.
- Available-to-promise. ATP nets on-hand against existing reservations and inbound supply, so the date you quote is a calculation, not a guess.
- Allocation exception workbench. Shortages, lot holds and shelf-life failures land in a workbench to resolve or assign, instead of dying quietly inside an order line.
- Backorder management. Every short line is tracked with rush/expedite/standard priority, and batch auto-allocation clears the queue the moment receipts land.
- Kit explosion. Kits explode into component lines that allocate and fulfill individually, so a kit is never 'in stock' when one component isn't.
Fulfillment & invoicing
From confirmed order to shipped and billed, without re-keying.
- Release to pick. One action hands allocated orders to the warehouse for wave picking — no printed pick list walked to the floor.
- Pick/pack visibility on the order. The order shows its own fulfillment status live, so 'where is my order' is answered from the screen, not by calling the warehouse.
- Partial shipments. Ship what's ready, keep the remainder allocated or backordered, and let the paperwork follow reality instead of blocking it.
- Invoices from shipments. AR invoices generate from what actually shipped, closing the gap where billing and the loading dock tell different stories.
Returns & RMA
A controlled lifecycle instead of a pile at the receiving door.
- Refund, replacement or credit. Every return declares its resolution type up front, so finance knows the exposure the day the RMA is opened.
- Approval before the truck. Returns move draft → approval → receipt, which ends the unannounced pallet of comebacks nobody authorized.
- Receive and inspect. Returned goods are received and inspected as explicit steps, so credit is issued on what came back — not on what the customer said they sent.
- Line-level disposition. Each returned line is dispositioned individually after inspection, so one damaged unit doesn't write off the whole return.
- Refunds wired to finance. Approved refunds and credits flow into AR directly, killing the sticky note between customer service and accounting.
Pricing, promotions & the team
The commercial layer — and the scoreboard.
- Customer-specific pricing. Orders price automatically from versioned price lists and customer profiles, so negotiated pricing survives staff turnover.
- Promotions engine with a simulator. Build a promotion and simulate it against a real order before launch, instead of discovering the stacking bug in week one revenue.
- Rebate agreements. Customer and vendor rebates are tracked as agreements with statuses, so accrued rebate liability stops living in someone's head.
- Targets and commissions. Reps see their own targets, progress and order-by-order commission math — ending the monthly argument with a spreadsheet.
- Sales dashboards. MTD/YTD/LY counters and breakdowns by rep, territory, product, channel and customer, refreshed from the orders themselves.
A promise date is a calculation, not a mood.
When a line is entered, the engine reserves real units — this bin, this lot, this warehouse — respecting each customer's lot rules and shelf-life requirements. What can't be reserved becomes a tracked backorder with a priority, not a silent shortfall discovered at pick time.
- Reserved down to the lot — Two orders can't be promised the same case, because the case is spoken for the moment the first one allocates.
- Exceptions become work items — Shortages and lot holds route to a workbench to be resolved or assigned — nothing fails silently.
- Backorders clear themselves — Priority-ranked auto-allocation sweeps the backorder queue the moment receiving posts new stock.
Win the negotiation without losing the margin.
Quotes convert to orders in one action, with every line intact. On Enterprise, customers can bid a price from the storefront and the engine answers on margin rules — accepting what clears, escalating what doesn't. Volume price breaks give big buyers a reason to commit without a phone call.
- Quote to order in one step — No re-keying between the quote your rep sent and the order the warehouse picks.
- Bids answered on margin, not memory — Auto-decision rules accept or escalate each bid against real cost, so nobody discounts below floor to close a Friday.
- Price breaks that sell volume — Published quantity breaks move buyers up a tier on their own, without a negotiation cycle.
What sales teams ask us
Can an order promise stock we don't actually have?
Not silently. Allocation reserves real bin- and lot-level inventory; anything it can't reserve becomes a visible backorder line with a priority. You can still take the order — you just can't accidentally promise the same case twice.
What happens when a customer is over their credit limit?
The order stops at confirm with the reason named — credit hold, over limit, or missing PO number. A user with the hold permission can release it deliberately. What never happens is the over-limit order shipping because nobody looked.
Do webstore, EDI and marketplace orders go through the same pipeline?
Yes. Every order lands in the same order table with its source tagged, and gets the same allocation, credit checks, tax engine and fulfillment flow. There is no second-class channel that skips the rules.
How do returns work when the goods come back damaged?
The RMA is approved first, then received, then inspected. Each line is dispositioned individually after inspection, so credit issues on what actually passed — one damaged unit doesn't decide the whole return.
Can we quote first and convert to an order later?
Yes — quotes convert to orders in one action with lines intact. On Enterprise, storefront customers can also submit bids that the engine answers automatically against your margin rules.
Do reps see their own numbers, or does someone email a spreadsheet?
Reps get their own views: assigned customers with YTD revenue and credit status, targets with live progress, and commission broken down order by order. The month-end spreadsheet argument retires.
Stop selling what you can't ship.
Fourteen days, every module, your own isolated tenant. Enter a real order against real stock and watch the promise date calculate itself.
14 days · every module · no card