Do you actually know your real margin?

The invoice always arrives late

A container clears, the goods hit the warehouse, and the order ships. The freight bill and the duty bill show up weeks later, sometimes a full quarter later. By the time they post, you've already quoted the next three deals off a cost that wasn't the real cost.

This isn't an edge case. It's how importing works. The problem isn't that the invoice is late. It's that most systems have nowhere to put it once it arrives, so it gets applied somewhere generic, or it doesn't get applied at all, and the case cost on the report never catches up to the case cost in the world.

Two sets of numbers, and neither one is wrong

This is the version distributors and importers describe most often: a spreadsheet built outside the accounting system says one margin. The accounting system says another. Nobody built either one to lie. They're just answering different questions. The spreadsheet knows what you paid the supplier. It doesn't know what you paid to get the bottle to your warehouse. The accounting system knows what posted. It just doesn't know it yet, because the freight invoice is still in someone's inbox.

Neither number is fake. Neither number is real margin either.

What real margin actually requires

Real margin means freight, duty, and fees applied to the case, including the invoices that show up after the goods do. It means that number lives next to the order, not in a separate file somebody reconciles once a month if there's time. And it means vintage and lot get tracked with the cost, because a 2022 and a 2023 of the same wine don't cost the same to land and shouldn't report as if they did.

None of that is complicated in principle. Order to cash is a contract. Landed cost is just the true cost of fulfilling it. The reason it's hard in practice is that most tools split the order from the cost from the accounting, and every split is a place the truth can get lost.

One system, so there's one number

Ruby Pro ERP applies freight, duty, and fees to the case, including invoices that arrive weeks after the goods, with vintage and lot tracked alongside the cost. It's the same system that runs the order, the inventory, and the accounting, so the margin you see is the margin that's actually posting, not a version reconciled by hand once a month. It's a full QuickBooks replacement, integrated to purchasing and inventory, built on the belief that a distributor's a distributor's a distributor: the mechanics are the same everywhere, so the system should be too.

It won't do everything on day one. If you ship through a 3PL with logistics needs outside straight order-to-cash, say so before you sign; that's a conversation, not an assumption.