Building for the beat, not the boardroom
Why instock is designed around the salesperson's route and the driver's day — and what that means for the software.
Most distribution software is built for the office. The dashboards are beautiful, the reports are thorough, and none of it survives contact with a salesperson on a two-wheeler in the middle of a market street with one bar of signal.
We started from the other end.
The beat is the product
A wholesale distributor’s day is a sequence of routes — “beats” — each a fixed list of shops a rep or driver visits in order. The beat is where orders are born, where stock leaves the building, and where money changes hands. If the software doesn’t work on the beat, it doesn’t work.
So the field app is offline-first. Orders, customer balances, price lists and proof-of-delivery all live on the device. Actions queue locally and sync when the connection comes back. The rep never waits for a spinner to take an order.
The office still matters
The counterpoint: everything the field captures has to land in the office instantly and correctly. An order taken at a shop reserves stock, respects the customer’s credit limit, applies the right group price, and is ready to invoice before the rep has left the counter.
One flow, two ends. That’s the whole idea.
What’s next
We’re writing more about how this shapes specific parts of the system — inventory reservation, GST invoice numbering, route sequencing. Subscribe to the changelog if you want to follow along.