Five tasks every wholesale business should stop doing by hand

Why wholesale is a step behind

Wholesale runs on paperwork, and most of it still moves by hand. A Federal Reserve analysis of Census data puts AI use among wholesale trade firms at about 13%, below the roughly 18% of all firms, even though 48% of individual wholesale workers use generative AI at work. The people are ready; the businesses haven’t caught up.

Distributors know it. In a Distribution Strategy Group survey of 233 executives, 93% called AI a strategic priority, but just 16% had put it to work across more than one part of the business. Size makes a difference: in the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors’ new AI Adoption Index, as reported by iDealer Central, 58.3% of distributors with more than $1 billion in revenue had at least one AI application scaled or fully deployed, against 19.4% of those under $50 million.

The same index points to where to start. The back office is furthest ahead, with 47.4% of respondents rating AI’s impact there as moderate or significant, and the biggest barriers are data quality and integration (68.1%) and skills (60.1%), well ahead of budget (27.5%). In other words: it isn’t the money, it’s the plumbing. And connecting the plumbing is exactly the part a good automation partner takes off your hands.

It isn’t the money. It’s the plumbing.

1. Typing supplier invoices into your accounting software

Every invoice that arrives as a PDF gets read, typed into the system, matched to a purchase order and checked. Ardent Partners’ accounts payable benchmarks put the average cost of processing one invoice at $9.84 and the average time at 8.2 days, with 18.4% of invoices hitting an exception. The best-performing teams process invoices at 79% lower cost and 79% faster than their peers.

Typing is also where errors creep in. Those benchmarks come mostly from larger companies, and the best research on retyping mistakes comes from healthcare: a 2019 study found that 3.7% of manually entered test results didn’t match the value sent automatically. Different industry, same keyboard.

Automated: the invoice is read from the email the moment it arrives, its lines are entered as a bill, prices are checked against the purchase order, and only the mismatches go to a person.

2. Re-keying customer orders

Orders arrive by email, as PDFs, by text and by phone, and someone types each one into the order system. Meanwhile buyers increasingly want to order without talking to anyone. Gartner found that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, according to Digital Commerce 360, and in another survey of 300 buyers, 73% named webstores, marketplaces and apps as their preferred way to buy. Among industrial-supply buyers, 65% had made at least one online purchase in 2025, up from 45% in 2018, and 24.4% order by text, Digital Commerce 360 reported.

Automated: an order that arrives by email or PDF is read, entered as a sales order and confirmed back to the buyer in minutes. Anything unusual, like a new customer or an unfamiliar item, waits for a person.

3. Updating stock by hand in several places

When the accounting system, the warehouse sheet and the website each hold their own stock count, someone spends their day reconciling them, and they’re still wrong by evening. Distribution Strategy Group’s 2026 technology report found that 55% of distributors have invested in ERP, CRM, ecommerce and analytics software but haven’t connected them. Its conclusion is worth repeating: the competitive gap is no longer about which tools a company owns, but whether they talk to each other.

Buyers notice. In a 2025 survey of 750 B2B buyers by Sana Commerce, 40% said a lack of transparency on stock and delivery dates was their top frustration, and 28% said inaccurate stock levels held them back.

Automated: one system is the source of truth, and every sale, receipt and return updates the others within minutes.

4. Answering “where’s my order?”

Every shipment that leaves without a tracking update becomes a phone call or an email later. In the same Sana survey, 52% of buyers said they want automated delivery tracking as a standard feature, and 75% said they would switch suppliers for a smoother online experience.

Automated: when an order ships, the buyer gets the tracking link without anyone sending it, and if a delivery is late, your team hears about it before the customer does.

5. Chasing reorders and payments

Two kinds of chasing eat time in wholesale. The first is money. Intuit QuickBooks’ 2025 late payments report found that 56% of US small businesses are owed money on unpaid invoices, $17,500 on average, and 47% have invoices more than 30 days overdue. In business-to-business trade, late payments affect 22% of receivables on average, and US companies often lose 1% to 2% of their invoices to bad debt, according to Atradius.

The second is reorders. Regular buyers drift away quietly, and by the time someone notices, it’s been months. We couldn’t find a trustworthy industry figure for how much this costs, so we won’t quote one. But anyone who has looked down a customer list and spotted a good account that stopped ordering knows the feeling.

Automated: reminders go out on a schedule before and after the due date, polite and consistent, and stop the moment the invoice is paid. And when a regular buyer’s gap between orders runs longer than usual, they get a personal note with their usual items, and your sales team gets a heads-up.

What the five have in common

None of these tasks needs judgment most of the time. They need accuracy and speed, which is exactly what people find tiring and software finds easy. Each one also sits close to your cash: bills paid correctly, orders entered faster, stock you can actually sell, customers who reorder and invoices that get paid.

You don’t have to do all five. Pick the one your team complains about most, automate it well, and keep a person approving anything that sends money or changes an order. Then move to the next.