Wholesale order automation built around Brightpearl

Brightpearl suits wholesalers and retailers who sell across several channels, and it does a lot automatically once an order is inside it. The friction for wholesale teams tends to sit at the edges: trade POs that arrive as email attachments, orders that need someone senior to sign them off, and a warehouse still working from printed paperwork.

Zestcode Automation builds a bespoke platform that reads emailed wholesale orders, applies your approval rules and creates the approved sales order in Brightpearl, with optional warehouse devices for picking and packing. When it goes live, your business owns it outright.

Where wholesale orders slow down

Picture a hypothetical homeware wholesaler. Its web and marketplace orders reach Brightpearl without anyone touching them. Its trade orders, perhaps forty a day, arrive as PDFs from independent shops and Excel files from larger stockists. Two people spend most mornings keying them in, checking prices against each account’s price list and chasing the occasional order that was sent twice.

Brightpearl’s automation is designed to act on orders it already holds. Turning a messy emailed PO into a clean, correct order in the first place is the job left over, and it’s the job this platform does.

A pre-flight list for every trade order

Before a trade order is created in Brightpearl, the platform works through the same list a careful sales administrator would:

1. Read the email body and every attachment together: typed or scanned PDF, Excel, CSV or Word.
2. Score each field out of 10 and highlight anything under 7.
3. Leave any missing detail blank instead of guessing it.
4. Match the sender to the right customer account.
5. Confirm every SKU exists.
6. Check stock for each line.
7. Compare each unit price with that customer’s price.
8. Check the PO number hasn’t already been used by that customer.

The result arrives in a review queue with the original email beside it and every warning pinned to the field it concerns.

Approvals that match how you actually sell

By default, a person approves every order before it goes anywhere. Beyond that, the rules are yours to set. Some wholesalers want orders above a certain value checked by a manager. Others want new accounts, orders with price mismatches, or orders from customers on stop held for the credit controller. We write these rules into the platform during the build, so they behave consistently rather than relying on someone remembering.

Automatic approval is built in but switched off. If you later want clean repeat orders from established accounts to go straight through, it can be turned on for exactly those and nothing else.

When an order is approved, it becomes a Brightpearl sales order against the matched customer, with the customer’s PO number as its reference. Invoicing, accounting and reporting in Brightpearl carry on as before. The ERP integration page explains that hand-off in more detail.

Does Brightpearl’s own warehouse tooling do the job?

For many businesses it does, and we’d tell you so. Brightpearl has warehouse features of its own, and if they fit the way you pick, there’s no reason to replace them. A bespoke warehouse stage tends to earn its place when the process is unusual: picks sorted by product group, weights, dimensions and photos captured at packing for pallet quotes or damage claims, or collections handled alongside deliveries.

In that case, approved orders appear on rugged Android devices on the warehouse floor. Staff sign in with a PIN, pick from a list sorted to suit your racking, and record what was packed. Each order is refreshed from Brightpearl when it’s opened, so a change made in the office isn’t missed. The warehouse page shows the screens.

Choosing a starting point

Either option is quoted at a fixed price after a free written specification. Running costs stay modest, with a few hundred orders a month usually costing under £50 in hosting and AI.

Whichever you choose, the code and the hosting sit in your company’s name. You aren’t renting software from us, there are no user licences, and ongoing support is an option rather than a condition of the deal.