Running van sales routes that actually make money

A van on the road is a rolling warehouse, a point of sale and a credit desk — usually run from a rep's memory and a paper pad. When distributors tell us a route "doesn't make money," the cause is almost never the route. It is that nobody can see the route.

Profit is decided at loading

The most expensive mistake in van sales happens in the yard: loading what the van carried yesterday instead of what today's stops will buy. Vans return heavy, produce ages, and the next morning the same guess gets loaded again.

The fix is unglamorous: load against the route plan. If the system knows the stops, their order history and what is already committed, the load list writes itself — and the van leaves with stock that has somewhere to go.

Visit order is a pricing decision

Fuel and time are the second silent cost. A route that zig-zags burns both, and the stops at the end get visited by a tired rep at 4 pm with whatever stock is left. Fixed visit order does more than save diesel: it means every store gets a predictable visit window, and predictable visits are what keep a store from filling the gap with your competitor.

Sell in the unit the store buys

A supermarket buys a crate; a corner shop buys three kilograms. If your system only sells whole containers, the rep either refuses the small sale or invents a workaround, and workarounds do not reconcile. The catalog has to carry both units against the same stock, with the same price rules, so the small sale is a real sale — recorded, priced and counted.

The day close is the whole ballgame

Everything above is preparation for one moment: the rep parks, and someone has to answer "does the cash in the bag match what the system says was sold?"

A guided day close walks the rep through counting cash, card and credit against every transaction on the route — on the device, before the engine is off. When the van's totals and the office ledger agree to the cent every single day, two things happen: shrinkage stops being invisible, and your route report becomes something you can actually manage against.

Measure routes like products

Once loading, visits, sales and close all flow through one system, each route gets a real P&L: revenue by stop, credit exposure by store, returns, fuel window, close variance. That is when route decisions stop being arguments and start being arithmetic — drop a stop, split a route, move a rep — with numbers attached.

That is the operating loop iotoms is built around: plan the route, load against it, sell in any unit offline, close to the cent, and read the whole day in the console before the rep is home.