Wholesale Distribution Software.
Know What Every Order Earned.
Wholesalers, distributors, dealers and specialty publishers run on a catalog, prices that depend on who is asking, orders that arrive five different ways, and money owed out the other end. Most of that lives in a spreadsheet beside the accounting system. We build the layer that holds it properly — and we keep running it.
What Is Wholesale Distribution Software?
Wholesale distribution software brings order management, customer-specific pricing, inventory and fulfilment into one system, so orders from email, web, portals and EDI land in a single queue. AltaPro AI builds custom wholesale distribution software for Alberta distributors around the catalog and pricing rules you already run.
- Order management from every channel
- Customer-specific pricing
- Inventory and catalog
- Fulfilment and backorders
- Order-to-cash
- Accounting integration
The Process Exists. It Lives In People.
The price depends on who is asking
Every account has its own negotiated pricing — tier, contract, volume break, an old letter nobody can find. The real price list lives in one person's spreadsheet and their memory, so quoting is a bottleneck and nobody else can cover it.
Orders arrive five different ways
Email, a PDF purchase order, a phone call, the web form, a distributor's portal, an EDI feed. Each one gets re-keyed by hand into the accounting system, which is where the typos, the duplicate orders and the missed lines come from.
Nobody can answer “where is my order” without asking someone
The status is real, it is just distributed across an inbox, a warehouse whiteboard and a shipping account. Answering a customer means interrupting two people, so the answer is slow and sometimes wrong.
Backorders and partial shipments are tracked by memory
A line ships, a line doesn’t, the rest is owed. What is actually outstanding across all open orders is a question the system cannot answer, so it gets answered by whoever has been there longest.
What you owe out is reconciled by hand
Channel fees, distributor statements, rep commissions, royalties. Each arrives on a different schedule in a different format, and somebody spends days a month matching them against what actually sold.
The catalog is in three places and they disagree
The website, the accounting system and the price list each hold a version of the same item. Changing a product means remembering all three, so one of them is always stale.
How Big Is Alberta Wholesale?
Thousands of distributors with a payroll, and close to a hundred thousand people working in the sector.
6,607
Wholesale businesses with employees operating in Alberta in June 2026, 2,365 of them with one to four people on payroll.
Source: Statistics Canada, Canadian Business Counts, June 2026 (Table 33-10-1174-01)
95,400
People employed in Alberta wholesale trade in 2025.
Source: Government of Alberta, Wholesale Trade Industry Profile, 2025
4.4%
Wholesale trade's share of Alberta's GDP in 2024.
Source: Government of Alberta, Wholesale Trade Industry Profile, 2025
Figures verified against each source in September 2026.
Catalog To Cash, On One Path.
Catalog and customer-specific pricing
One catalog record per item, with the pricing rules that actually apply to each account — tiers, contract rates, volume breaks, effective dates. Quoting stops depending on the one person who knows.
Multi-channel order intake
Orders from email, PDFs, the web, portals and feeds landing in one queue in one shape, with the document attached to the order rather than sitting in someone’s inbox. Structured extraction where the source is unstructured.
Fulfilment, backorders and partial shipments
What shipped, what is owed, what is allocated and what is genuinely outstanding across every open order — as a state the system holds rather than a thing people reconstruct.
Order-to-cash on one path
Order, confirmation, pick, ship, invoice, payment — one record carried the whole way with nothing re-entered between steps, and the accounting system fed rather than duplicated.
Channel, commission and royalty reconciliation
Statements from distributors, marketplaces and channel partners matched against your own sales records, with the exceptions surfaced instead of the whole file being checked line by line.
Integration with what you already run
QuickBooks or your ERP, the storefront, the shipping accounts, the warehouse. We integrate with the systems you keep rather than asking you to replace them.
Built In This Category.
We have built working software in this category — catalog, pricing and order mechanics for a specialty technical publisher, whose titles, standing orders, distributor statements and royalties are the same spine a parts distributor runs on. We describe clients rather than naming them, here and everywhere else on this site.
Behind that sits the production record the mechanics come from: structured pricing and document intake that took a demolition contractor's bid process from two to three hours down to minutes, and a single operations platform that replaced five systems for a general contractor working across Edmonton and Calgary. Both figures are client-reported. Warehouse automation and physical logistics are the honest edge of this — they are somebody else's scope, and we say so below.
The Rules, Built In.
The records your industry is held to are captured as the work happens, not rebuilt when someone asks. Systems can be hosted in Canada when you need it, and your data stays yours. How we handle security and data.
Tax-ready transaction records
Every order, credit and adjustment kept with its GST treatment and supporting documents, flowing into the accounting you keep so year-end and a CRA review start from clean records.
Lot & recall traceability
Where products carry lot or batch numbers, receiving and shipments are linked so any lot can be traced to the customers who received it.
Privacy & anti-spam
Personal information handled to Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act and PIPEDA, and every follow-up message built for Canada's anti-spam law — consent recorded, unsubscribe honoured at once.
Permissions & audit trail
Permission levels by role, a record of who changed what and when, and anything customer-facing that needs a person held for sign-off. That safeguard layer is AltaGate, and it is in every system we build.
Before You Book The Call.
We already have QuickBooks and a storefront. Why would we need anything else?
You probably don't need them replaced. What is usually missing is the layer between them — the place where a customer's real negotiated price lives, where an emailed PDF order becomes a structured order, and where what is owed on a backorder is a fact rather than a memory. That layer is what we build, and it feeds the systems you keep rather than competing with them.
Is this an ERP?
No. An ERP asks you to adopt its model of your business and then pays consultants to bend it back toward reality. We build around the operation you already run, your data stays yours, and every feature earns its place.
Our pricing rules are genuinely complicated. Is that a problem?
That is usually the reason to build rather than buy. Off-the-shelf systems support the pricing models their vendor anticipated; the ones that don't fit end up as a spreadsheet beside the system, which is the situation you already have. Customer-specific pricing with tiers, contract rates, volume breaks and effective dates is a normal thing to model properly.
Does this work for a publisher or a business that isn't classic wholesale?
Yes, and we have built in it. A specialty publisher has a catalog of titles, standing orders from libraries and institutions, distributor statements to reconcile and royalties to pay out — the same spine as a parts distributor with SKUs, contract pricing, channel statements and rep commissions. We have built catalog, pricing and order software for exactly that shape of business. If yours runs on a catalog, orders arriving through several channels and money owed out the other end, this page is about you even if the nouns are different.
How do you handle orders that arrive as PDFs or emails?
Structured extraction into the same order shape as everything else, with the original document attached to the record. The extraction is checked rather than trusted — a person confirms before it becomes an order — because a silently wrong quantity is worse than a slow one.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
Scope drives both, and both get written into a scope agreement before work starts. The 30-minute call is where a real number and a real timeline get put on it. We build in phases so you see working software early rather than one launch months out.
Bring The Spreadsheet
Nobody Else Can Run.
Thirty minutes, no deck. Walk us through how an order gets from a customer to an invoice today, and where it stops being a system and starts being a person. We will tell you honestly whether that is worth building around.
Where To Go Next.
Up a level
Customer & Partner Portals
Job status, approvals and documents your customers reach themselves.
More In This Series
Operational Software
Jobs, customers, approvals and documents in one system you can own.
Internal Tools & Admin Portals
The one internal screen that replaces a spreadsheet and three logins.
Systems Integration
Accounting, CRM and field systems wired so nothing is retyped.
Proposal & Contract Automation
Document generated from your numbers, signed in the same flow.
Construction & Field Operations Software
RFIs, change orders and progress billing over dispatch, crews and job history.
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