The problem
Order logistics and AP/AR across a distribution order book.
Sitting between manufacturers and national retail distributors means living with two sets of rules that do not agree. Each distributor has its own routing requirements, labelling standards, document formats and penalty schedule. Each manufacturer has its own lead times, minimums and billing conventions. The order book is where those meet, and every mismatch becomes either a chargeback, a delayed payment or a phone call.
The work is unforgiving in a specific way: the errors are small, individually cheap, and constant. A late advance ship notice or a document that does not match the purchase order costs a fee rather than a crisis, so the cost accumulates quietly in the margin instead of arriving as a problem somebody escalates.
My role
I led the order logistics team and managed billing, purchase-order reconciliation, distributor requirements and vendor negotiations.
What the work covered
I led a three-person order logistics team covering AP and AR billing, invoice processing and purchase order reconciliation from January 2024 to December 2025. The order book covered 12 manufacturers and 23 national retail distributors. I standardized work across NetSuite, Cleartrack and SPS Commerce, negotiated tariff and currency exposure on inbound product, and handled chargebacks, advance ship notices and disputes.
How the work ran
An order book like this one runs across several systems at once, and nothing about that arrangement is unusual or automatic. An order moves cleanly through them because someone has defined what each system is authoritative for and what the handoff between them looks like.
That is also what makes reconciliation possible at all. When a distributor disputes a charge, the answer has to be reconstructable from records rather than recalled by whoever happened to handle it.
Chargebacks are worth reading as information rather than only absorbing as cost. A recurring penalty against the same requirement is a defect in the process producing the documents, and it is cheaper to fix the process than to keep paying and appealing. Tariff and currency exposure on inbound product was negotiated on the same principle, which is that terms are a lever available before the cost arrives rather than after.
Evidence
This is my own account with no third-party corroboration.
Observed results
No throughput, error-rate or financial result is published here, and the underlying figures belong to a former employer rather than to me. Nothing about the effect of the standardization is claimed.
A business assessing this kind of work should ask for the chargeback rate by requirement, the share of invoices paid without a dispute, and the time between shipment and payment. Those are the measures that show whether the order book is running well. This entry offers none of them.
What this does not show
The distributors are described by category. Commercial throughput figures are omitted. No employer documents or confidential throughput amounts are included.
This is a confirmed career account rather than a consulting engagement. It describes work done as an employee inside one order book, with the systems and trading partners that business had chosen.
Relevant next action
If existing software is in place and people still work around it, the configuration and integration engagement starts with the actual workflow rather than the settings screen. The reporting that makes an order book legible is in business metrics and reporting, and the record-quality work underneath it is in read-only ERP checks.