FMCG & CPG Field Sales Software for South African Brands

Five roles share the one app: the van sales rep selling off the vehicle, the pre-sales rep taking tomorrow's order, the merchandiser working the shelf, the key-account executive covering national chains, and the distributor's own sales team. Each opens a different set of screens, a different call list and a different scorecard, whether the day runs through Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Gqeberha, Bloemfontein or Polokwane.

The rep takes a selfie and the app stamps a GPS fix at the same moment. Face matching stops a colleague signing in for him, and the geo-fence means the clock only starts inside the territory he was assigned. Because street addressing is inconsistent across much of the independent trade, outlets are held on GPS pins rather than addresses. The supervisor sees position, late starts and hours worked on a single board.

The permanent journey plan lays outlets across the days of a cycle, from a chain store on the main road to the block of spaza shops behind it. Every outlet carries a GPS pin, and that is what makes a crowded trading area such as Warwick Junction in Durban or the Bree taxi rank in Johannesburg routable at all. Call frequency is set by class of outlet, and a call that gets missed is pushed into the next available slot instead of quietly disappearing.

Take the order line by line, record what has sold through, photograph the shelf and the fridge and score the share, note what rivals are charging and in which pack sizes, take a rand payment against open invoices, and book short-dated or damaged stock back. Each of those carries a location and a timestamp, and a visit type can make individual steps compulsory before the call is allowed to close.

Distributors record what they received and what went out in the portal. Independent wholesalers and cash-and-carry operators sit between them and the trade. Reps then capture what genuinely moved at each retailer. Ledgers, credit position and route-level distributor performance roll into a single view running from the depot, through the wholesale tier, down to the shelf a shopper buys off.

Plenty of counters still settle in notes, so a cash collection is booked against the invoice with a photo or a reference number. Card, instant EFT and PayShap receipts are captured the same way. Credit limits and ageing update live, so the rep can see what an owner already owes before agreeing to load another order.

Batch and expiry are captured in the distributor warehouse and again at the outlet, so short-dated stock surfaces while it can still be sold rather than written off. The batch trail the app builds supports SAHPRA and SABS record-keeping where a line falls under those regimes. Returns, damages and swaps are logged against the batch, and reporting flags lines nearing expiry by province and by distributor so they clear early.

A claim goes up in rand from the handset with the slip photographed, split across daily allowance, fuel, travel, accommodation and airtime. Policy caps flag anything over limit on their own, and approvals route through the line manager and then finance. Leave balances, the South African public holiday calendar and the month-end attendance close all feed the payroll run.

Yes. Volume slabs, buy-one-get-one, target incentives and shopper promotions are all set up by outlet class, route, channel or line. Eligibility is applied as the order is keyed, so a township tuck shop and a national chain store can sit on completely different schemes without the rep having to remember which is which. Redemption and key-account payouts show on the dashboard with the audit trail behind them.

Yes, offline-first is how both the Android and iOS apps are built. Coverage thins out on rural routes and drops in pockets of township trade, and mobile data is not cheap, so attendance, orders, collections, audits and photographs are written to the handset first and pushed up the moment a bar returns. A light interface that is easy on battery, and screens the field force can read in the language it works in, keep a long day on the road manageable.