Inventory software for electrical and lighting distributors
An electrical and lighting catalog is where generic inventory software breaks. A luminaire, a breaker and a reel of cable share no field list, and five columns named Custom Field 1 through 5 describe none of them.
What is electrical and lighting inventory software?
Electrical and lighting inventory software is a stock and order system whose catalog can hold the electrical specifications a counter sale turns on (volts, amperage, colour temperature, IP rating, pole count) as searchable fields rather than as free text, and which tracks that stock across a trade counter and a warehouse separately. It differs from general inventory software in one respect that decides everything else: the attributes that identify a product differ by category, so a luminaire and a breaker cannot share one field list.
The specifics are the point. A luminaire needs a lumen output, a colour temperature, a beam angle and an IP rating. A breaker needs an amperage, a pole count, an interrupting rating and a panel compatibility. A reel of cable needs a conductor size, an insulation type and a length that is cut rather than counted. What follows from that is not cosmetic: when the attributes a customer asks about are not fields, they cannot be filtered, cannot be searched at the counter while someone waits on the phone, and cannot be shown on a quote without retyping. This page covers what the catalog has to record, how counter and will-call orders interact with stock that is committed but not yet collected, and where multi-location stock visibility stops being a nice-to-have.
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What the catalog has to record
The attribute list differs by category, but the requirement underneath is the same: the fields a customer asks about have to be fields. If someone calls and asks for a 4000K fitting rated IP65, that has to be a filter, not a memory test.
Unit of measure is where the money leaks
Wire is the clearest case. It is bought on reels and sold by the foot, quoted per hundred, and cut to length at the counter, which means one product carries three numbers that all have to agree: what arrived, what is left on the reel, and what was sold. A system that models stock in a single unit forces somebody to do that arithmetic by hand, and the error shows up as a reel that is shorter than the system thinks.
The same shape recurs across the catalog. Conduit and strut come in standard lengths and leave in cut ones. Fittings arrive by the carton and sell by the each. None of that is exotic — it is the ordinary business of a supply house — but it does mean unit of measure has to be a property of the product rather than an assumption baked into the software.
LineraFlow holds unit of measure as a category attribute, and stock movements are recorded per location as an append-only ledger, so what was received, adjusted and shipped is a history rather than a single number that gets overwritten. It does not perform automatic conversion between purchase and sale units, and that is worth knowing before you trial it: the ledger will tell you honestly what moved, but the conversion rule lives with your process.
Where multi-location stops being optional
A trade counter plus a warehouse is already multi-location, even if it is one address. The question is whether the system can tell you what is at the counter versus what is on the rack, because “we have six” is not an answer when the six are in the wrong building.
Each location carries its own on-hand and reserved balance, and stock committed to a will-call order is reserved rather than deducted — it stays on the shelf, stops being sellable, and still counts in a stock take. That distinction is what prevents two people selling the same reel on the same afternoon.
Getting your catalog in
Electrical catalogs arrive from several suppliers in inconsistent shapes, and the attributes that matter are usually spread across columns nobody agreed on. CSV import runs as a dry run first: you map columns, get a report of every row that would fail, fix the source file, and only then write anything. Most distributors do their own migration on that basis.
Where LineraFlow fits, and where it does not
One to five locations and catalogs up to 10,000 SKUs, with orders arriving over a counter, a phone or a Shopify store. Past that ceiling a larger platform is the right purchase. There is no lot, serial or expiry tracking, no EDI onboarding for large wholesale partners, and no automatic unit conversion between how you buy and how you sell.
Can I define different attributes for luminaires and for breakers?
Yes, that is the core of the catalog model. Attributes are defined per category rather than shared across the whole catalog, so luminaires can carry lumens, colour temperature and beam angle while breakers carry amperage and pole count, and neither category shows the other's empty fields on a product form.
What happens to older products when we change a category's attributes?
They keep the attribute set they were created under. Category schemas are versioned, and a product binds to the version that was active when it was written, so adding a field next year does not silently reinterpret what a product recorded last year. Historical data stays meaningful instead of acquiring blank columns.
How does stock at the counter work if the customer has not collected it yet?
Stock committed to a will-call order is reserved rather than deducted, so it stops showing as available to sell while remaining physically on hand until collection. That distinction is what prevents the classic counter double-sale, where two people sell the same reel because the system only tracks one number.