Stock counts nobody fully trusted.
Meridian imports goods from three continents and distributes them across four warehouse locations to retail and trade customers. Before switching to Encarmo, stock levels lived in a shared spreadsheet that three different people updated — whenever they remembered to, and usually from memory rather than an actual count.
“We had stockouts we didn't know about until a customer called,” says CEO Amir Mahmoud. “And overstock on lines we'd forgotten we'd even ordered.” The business estimates its stock accuracy at the time was “somewhere around 70%” — a number nobody could state with confidence, because nobody had a system that actually tracked it.
The knock-on effect reached accounting. Cost of goods sold was calculated once a month from the same spreadsheet, by hand, which meant gross margin was always a rough estimate rather than a real number — and always arrived weeks after the sales it was supposed to explain.
One system, not three.
Meridian had looked at standalone inventory tools before, but every option created the same problem in a different shape: a dedicated inventory system with no real accounting connection, meaning COGS would still need to be calculated separately every month.
“What got us to actually switch was realizing we didn't need a better inventory app — we needed inventory and accounting to be the same system,” Mahmoud says. “Every other tool we looked at was going to leave that gap exactly where it already was.”
“Since switching to Encarmo, every location is live, reorder alerts fire automatically, and our stock accuracy rate went from somewhere around 70% to over 98% in the first month. The COGS integration with accounting alone saved our bookkeeper about six hours a month.”
Live by the end of the week.
Meridian's existing product catalogue and supplier records were imported from a spreadsheet export — no reformatting required. Opening stock counts were entered against each of the four warehouse locations during setup, and reorder points were configured per product based on historical order patterns.
The full migration, including a physical stock count to establish accurate opening balances, was complete within a single working day. Encarmo's support team handled the data import directly rather than leaving it to Meridian's team to figure out the mapping themselves.
Inventory
Real-time stock across 4 warehouses, automated reorder alerts, and FIFO valuation matched to Meridian's import accounting requirements.
Accounting
COGS posts automatically on every invoiced sale. Multi-currency support handles supplier payments in the currencies Meridian buys in.
A number everyone can finally agree on.
Within the first month, Meridian's stock accuracy — now measured precisely rather than estimated — reached 98%. Reorder alerts have eliminated the stockout-by-phone-call problem entirely: the system flags low stock before a customer ever notices a gap.
On the finance side, the bookkeeper's monthly COGS calculation — previously a manual, multi-hour exercise performed from the same spreadsheet everyone else was already arguing with — no longer exists as a task. The number is simply already correct, because every sale posts it automatically.
“I used to brace myself before our monthly numbers review. Now I just open the dashboard. The margin figure is already right.”
“Reorder alerts changed how we plan purchasing entirely. We're buying based on real data, not a gut feeling about what's probably running low.”
Meridian now plans to add Encarmo's CRM module later this year, to connect live stock visibility directly into the sales team's deal records — so reps can see real availability before quoting a customer, rather than checking with the warehouse first.