In a company that sells from vans, the hardest hour of the day is not in the morning but in the evening. The van sales rep gets back to the depot, counts the goods still in the van, puts the cash and cheques from their pocket on the desk and unloads the cases taken back as returns. Then someone tries to match all of it against the paper slips.
If the numbers add up, everyone goes home. If they don't, and there is usually a small gap somewhere, a search that can last hours begins. At BernSoftware, while building the van sales module of our field sales platform BernSFA, we spent a long time talking about why this last hour is so hard. Nearly all of the problems share one root: what happens during the day is not recorded at the moment it happens.
Van stock: the gap between the morning load and what is left at night
In the morning the rep loads a certain amount of goods into the van. During the day they sell, take returns, and now and then exchange a product picked up from one customer with another customer. In the evening, what is left in the van has to match "loaded, minus sold, plus returned".
In a team that works on paper, this sum is done at the end of the day. When it doesn't match, finding out at which customer and at what time the gap appeared is close to impossible. One slip was written up short, one case was entered under the wrong product code, a giveaway or a sample was never recorded at all.
The answer is to treat the van's stock as a warehouse of its own. The morning load is moved onto the van with a dispatch transaction, and every sale and return updates the van stock immediately. The rep cannot sell a product that is not in the van, and the evening count becomes nothing more than confirming the record kept all day.
Returns: the item that goes missing most
Returns are the messiest part of van sales. A customer hands back products close to their expiry date, a damaged case turns up, goods delivered by mistake are swapped. The rep often jots it down somewhere or doesn't write it down at all, thinking "I'll mention it tonight."
The result: the return never appears on the customer's account, and at the next visit the customer rightly objects. The returned goods unloaded at the depot don't match the records either.
Recording the return on the same screen as the sale, linked to the same customer and with its reason, breaks this chain. The return is applied to the van stock and to the customer's balance at that very moment.
Collections: whose account does the cash in the pocket belong to?
During the day the rep takes cash, cheques or promissory notes. Receipts are written by hand; some get lost, some wait until the next day. Until accounting processes the payment, the customer's balance looks higher than it is, and in the meantime another rep or salesperson may ask the same customer to pay again.
Recording the collection in the mobile app and handing over the receipt on the spot as a PDF fixes two problems at once: the customer has a document, and head office sees the money before the rep is back at the depot. The evening cash count is then checked against the total in the app.
Invoices and orders on the spot
Some reps only take orders; others hand over the goods right away and issue the invoice there and then. In the second case getting the price right matters even more, because any mistake ends up on the document in the customer's hands.
When the price list, customer-specific prices and discount rules are defined in the app, the rep no longer needs a calculator to work out a discount. The sale comes off the van stock, and the invoice or order is passed to the ERP.
Closing the day: a check, not a calculation from scratch
When every transaction is recorded during the day, closing the day turns into a different job. The rep closes the day in the app, and the system produces a summary of that day's sales, returns, collections and remaining van stock. The count at the depot and the cash are compared with that summary.
A gap can still appear. But now it is clear which line it sits in, and the answer to "which customer, which transaction?" is right there in the records.
What head office sees
A van sales system does more than shorten the evening. It also matters that head office can see, during the day:
- Which products are left in which van, and what needs loading tomorrow morning?
- How much has been collected from which customer, and whose balance is still open?
- Which products come back often, and why?
- Which customers on the route have been visited, and which are still to go?
When there is no signal
Van sales often take place out of town, in industrial estates and inside warehouses. If the app waits for the internet, the rep falls back on paper and the whole routine breaks down. That is why recording sales, returns and collections offline and syncing them once the connection is back is not a nice-to-have for a van sales rep but a requirement.
Start the switch with one van
Moving every rep to the new system on the same day can mean everyone waiting at the depot on the first evening. The safer route is a pilot with a single van or region. The gaps, product code mismatches and discount exceptions that surface in the first weeks are fixed with that team, and then the system is rolled out to the other vans.
In short
End-of-day chaos comes from trying to work out in one evening session everything that was not recorded during the day. Keeping van stock as a warehouse of its own, recording returns and collections as they happen and turning the close into a verification step shortens that last hour.
BernSFA's van sales module brings van stock, dispatch and returns, on-the-spot invoicing, collections and the end-of-day close together in one app, and works two ways with Logo, Mikro, Netsis or SAP.
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