StellaIQ automates the supplier statements, invoice matching, order entry and stock decisions that eat a distributor's week — built around the ERP you already run, not instead of it.
The systems stop being the problem and the joins between them start.
A wholesaler doing £5m with fifteen staff usually runs an ERP bought years ago, an accounting package, a shared mailbox and a great deal of Excel. Each one works. Nothing passes anything to anything else, so people do the passing. Supplier statements arrive as PDFs and someone reconciles them line by line against the purchase ledger. Orders arrive by email and someone retypes them. Stock is right in the system and wrong on the shelf, so someone checks. A price is agreed on the phone and someone remembers to apply it.
None of that is a technology failure. It is the cost of growing faster than the systems did, and it is paid every single day in hours that nobody has budgeted for. It is also, almost entirely, work a computer can do.
Most of what is sold as AI is automation with a better name, and the distinction matters because it changes what you should pay and what you should trust.
Reconciling a supplier statement is arithmetic. Applying a customer's agreed terms is a rule. Flagging stock below its reorder point is a comparison. Optimising a delivery round is a calculation. None of those need a language model, and putting one in front of them makes the job slower, more expensive and less certain — because rules are instant, cheap, auditable, and incapable of inventing an answer.
AI earns its place somewhere narrower: reading messy documents that arrive in forty different layouts, answering a question from your own material, and turning a day of exceptions into something a human can read in two minutes. We tell you which of your problems is which, and we do not sell you the expensive one when the cheap one works.
Ranked by what they are worth in a distribution business, not by what is easiest to demo.
Statements arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets and email bodies. They are read, matched against the purchase ledger, and returned as an exception list — missing invoices, duplicates, credits not applied — instead of a reconciliation job. Usually the fastest payback in the building.
Three-way matching without three people. Quantities, prices and terms checked against the order and the delivery, with only the mismatches surfacing for a human decision.
Trade customers order the way they always have — email, attachment, occasionally a photograph. The order is extracted, checked against the account and its pricing, and raised without retyping.
Reorder recommendations from actual sales velocity, supplier lead times and stock on hand, rather than a number somebody set in 2019 and nobody has revisited.
Agreed terms applied consistently, every time, without depending on who happens to pick up the phone.
Capture at the point of delivery, automatic notification, signed paperwork filed against the job, and exceptions flagged the same day rather than found at month end.
Yes, and that is deliberate. Replacing an ERP in a £1m–£20m distributor is a six-figure project with a year of disruption attached. Automating around one is a fixed-price build measured in weeks. We would rather find out how much of the manual work disappears without touching the core system, and we will say so plainly if the honest answer is that the ERP itself is the constraint.
The systems we meet most often in this sector are Sage 50 and Sage 200, Xero, QuickBooks, SAP Business One, Cin7, Unleashed, Microsoft 365 and a very large amount of Excel. Where a system has an API we use it. Where it does not — and plenty of older ERPs do not — we work with exports, database views or the file drops it already produces. An ageing system is not a blocker; it is just a different integration.
Fixed prices, stated plainly, before you commit to anything.
An operations audit costs £2,500 plus VAT. We spend time on site watching how the work is actually done rather than how it is described, and you get a ranked map of every opportunity with a figure against each one, an assessment of what can be integrated and what cannot, and a first build scoped at a fixed price. The audit stands on its own and belongs to you, whether or not you build anything with us afterwards.
A first automation build starts at £5,000 plus VAT. One workflow designed, built, deployed and handed over documented, with your team trained on it and thirty days of post-launch support included. A full engagement across several workstreams starts at £12,500 plus VAT. A discovery call costs nothing and is a conversation with the founder rather than a salesperson.
Everything is built in your own cloud account, fully documented, with administrator access from the first day. If you stop working with us, you keep the systems and the keys.
Two days on site, a ranked opportunity map with a value against each item, and a first build scoped at a fixed price.
One workflow built end to end, documented, with your team trained and thirty days of support.
Discovery, design and deployment across several workstreams.
In a recent engagement with a national industrial services company, StellaIQ cut manual document processing time by roughly 80% across a fifteen-day build, by reading delivery paperwork automatically, filing it against the right job and routing only the exceptions to a person. We do not publish client names, and we will not publish yours either.
What we will do on a discovery call is talk through the specific mechanics of that work — what was read, what was matched, what a human still checks and why — so you can judge whether the same thing applies to your operation rather than taking a logo on a page as evidence.
A standard engagement runs fifteen days from kickoff to a working system in production. The audit that precedes it takes two days on site and a written report within ten working days.
Usually not, and we would rather prove it. Most of what costs you time sits in the gaps between systems rather than inside any one of them. If your ERP genuinely is the constraint we will tell you, but we will not lead with it.
No. Everything runs in your own cloud account, under your own administrator credentials, and nothing is used to train anyone else's model.
Most of what we build is not AI, it is rules, and rules do not guess. Where a model does read a document, its output is checked against something verifiable and anything uncertain is routed to a person. We do not give software authority to pay a supplier or change a price.
We work with businesses between roughly £1m and £20m turnover. Below that the arithmetic rarely justifies a build; above it you probably have people whose job this already is.
The founder runs the audit and the build, on site. You are not handed to an account manager and you are not sold a retainer for work that has a finish line.
Forty-five minutes, no obligation, and you will get an honest answer about which of your problems is worth automating and which is not.
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