Wholesale Handler
What Notion holds well
A database with typed properties, related to a second database of line items, with rollups summing the lines back onto the order. That is a real data model rather than a grid, and it holds an order properly - the customer, the delivery date, the products, the quantities and a total that recalculates.
It also totals across orders, so the sum of every line for Thursday is available without building it by hand. A board cannot do that, and a spreadsheet does it with formulas that break when someone inserts a row.
The customer cannot place the order
Notion Forms are the closest thing to intake. A form writes a submission into a database, which does move the typing off your desk.
What a form does not do is know who is filling it in. There is no sign-in, so the submitter picks their own name from a field, and the form cannot show them a price while they fill it. They send product names and quantities, and pricing happens afterwards, by you, from a rate you have to look up. The portal arrangement is the opposite - in Wholesale Handler the customer signs in, sees their own prices, builds the order against them, and the priced record exists the moment they submit.
One page, one set of prices
A page shared by link shows identical content to everyone with the link. Notion has no per-viewer pricing, so a single price list page cannot show a cafe its rate and a distributor a different one.
The way around it is a page per customer, each maintained by hand, and each shared with that customer alone as an invited guest. That works for a handful of accounts. At twenty it is twenty pages to update whenever a cost moves, and a price that was meant to change everywhere has changed in one place.
Nothing refuses a submission
A form accepts what is sent to it whenever it is sent. There is no ordering deadline, no minimum spend, no stock check and no delivery-day validation, so an order for a Sunday you do not deliver on, placed at midnight for the morning, arrives looking exactly like a valid one. Every check happens in your head as you read it.
No invoice comes out of it
A rollup produces a total, which is not an invoice. An invoice is a numbered, dated document with terms on it, a record of what was delivered and a status saying whether it has been paid. Notion holds a table of invoices if you type them in, which means the invoice was produced somewhere else.
What an ordering system holds instead
In Notion a price belongs to a page, not to a customer, and there is no field that decides whether an order can be placed at all. Both of those are what an ordering system is for.
Wholesale Handler assigns each customer one price list, and lists derive their prices from a single Default catalogue by percentage, so a cost change is made once and moves through every list rather than through a page per account. The customer signs in, sees their own prices and builds the order against them, so the priced record exists the moment they submit it.
In Wholesale Handler the checks are settings rather than judgement. Each delivery day carries its own ordering deadline, a minimum spend sits on the customer's order profile, and a date you do not deliver on is disabled in the picker with the reason stated. The midnight order for a Sunday cannot be submitted, so it does not arrive to be spotted.
In Wholesale Handler invoices come out of the orders. A week of processed orders for one customer collates into a single draft invoice to check and send, rather than one retyped from a total.
What it is still worth using for
- The customer record - contacts, delivery notes, what was agreed, who to ring at each account.
- Product information - specs, ingredients, packaging, photographs, shelf life.
- The written-down parts of the business - the bake plan, the delivery round, the procedures a second person would need.
- Work that is not an order - a market stall booking, a label reprint, a van service.
