Van sales or pre-sales: which one fits your distribution business

Every distributor already runs one of these two models, usually without having chosen it. The van goes out loaded and comes back with money, or the salesman goes out empty and comes back with orders. The difference sounds like a delivery detail. It decides how much stock you carry, how much credit you give, how many outlets one man can cover, and what you can find out at the end of the day.

The actual difference

Van sales — also called direct sales, or simply “load and go” — means the stock travels with the order. The salesman reaches the shop, takes the order, bills it, hands over the goods and collects, all in one stop. What he did not sell comes back on the van.

Pre-sales means the order travels first and the stock follows. The salesman books orders today; a delivery vehicle runs the same shops tomorrow with exactly what was ordered. Nothing goes out that has not already been sold.

Everything else — how many people you need, what a stock count means, when you find out about a problem — follows from that one difference.

Where van sales wins

• Small outlets buying small quantities. A kirana taking four packets does not want to place an order and wait a day for it. He wants it off the van now, and he will buy from whoever has it on the vehicle.
• Cash markets. Goods and money change hands in the same minute. That is the cheapest collection process that exists, and it is why van sales survives in markets where credit is a problem.
• Fast-moving, low-value lines. Biscuits, snacks, beverages, daily consumables — categories where the shopkeeper's decision takes ten seconds and the risk of carrying stock on the van is low.
• Scattered or rural beats. If reaching a village costs you an hour, doing it twice — once for the order, once for the delivery — is not a route plan, it is a fuel bill.

Where pre-sales wins

• Bigger baskets. A salesman with a catalogue and no boot space sells wider than one limited to what happens to be loaded. Order lines per bill go up, because “out of stock on the van” stops being an answer.
• Expensive or slow-moving SKUs. Stock that sits on a van all week is working capital going for a drive.
• Dense urban beats. When outlets are a hundred metres apart, a two-wheeler salesman covers far more of them in a morning than a van can park at.
• Credit-heavy trade. With pre-sales you decide whether to deliver an order to a shop that has not paid for the last one, before the goods leave the godown. In van sales that decision is taken at the counter by whoever is holding the invoice book.

What each one costs you

Van sales spreads your stock across every vehicle on the road. If six vans each carry a comfortable buffer, that buffer is real money, and it is invisible: nobody counts it because it never sits in the godown. It also concentrates authority at the counter, where the salesman decides the price, the free goods and the credit, alone, in front of the customer.

Pre-sales costs you a day. An order booked on Tuesday reaches the shop on Wednesday, and every urgent requirement in between goes to a competitor who had it on the van. It also needs a second run — the delivery vehicle — which only pays for itself once the orders it carries are big enough.

Most distributors end up running both

This is not a compromise, it is usually the right answer. The common split:

• Van sales on rural and semi-urban beats, and on the fast-moving lines that sell themselves.
• Pre-sales in the town beats and for the larger outlets — supermarkets, wholesalers, anyone whose order is worth a planned delivery.
• A third pattern that is really both at once: the salesman bills on the van for what he carries, and books an order for what he does not, which goes out on the next delivery run.

If you run both, the thing to insist on is that both end up in the same ledger. Two systems that each hold half the day's sales is how a distributor ends up unable to answer what a shop bought last month.

Five questions that decide it

1. What does an average bill look like? Under a few hundred rupees, a second delivery trip cannot be justified. Van sales.
2. How far apart are the outlets? Far apart favours one trip that does everything. Close together favours a salesman on foot or a two-wheeler booking orders quickly.
3. How much of your trade is on credit? Heavy credit is easier to control when the delivery decision is separate from the sale.
4. How many SKUs do you actually want to sell? If the answer is more than a van can carry sensibly, pre-sales is how the rest of the range gets in front of the shopkeeper.
5. What does an unsold pack cost you if it comes back? Short shelf life, breakage-prone packaging, or high value all argue against keeping stock on wheels.

Before you change model, fix the counting

Switching from van sales to pre-sales does not fix a business that cannot say what went out this morning. It just moves the confusion to a different vehicle. Whichever model you run, these have to be true:

• Loading a vehicle is recorded — what went on, in units, not “approximately four cases”.
• Every bill is entered the same day, including the ones that were paid in cash on the spot.
• What comes back is counted against what went out, before the van is parked for the night.
• Free goods and price changes at the counter are written down as they happen, not reconstructed at month end. Most of the leakage described in where a distributor’s margin actually goes hides in exactly this gap.

Get those four right and you can run either model, or both, and still know your position at 7pm. Get them wrong and no model helps.

What this means for your software

A system built only for counter billing treats a van as a customer, which means your own stock leaves the books the moment it is loaded. A system built only for pre-sales has no concept of billing at the shop at all. If you run both models, you need one that separates who bills from who delivers, and reconciles the van at the end of the day.

That is what Mulberry Sales does for van sales: the vehicle is loaded in units, bills are raised at the shop from what is actually on board, and the day closes by counting what came back. Orders booked for a later delivery run through the same ledger, so the shop’s account is one account either way.