The Order Desk Leak Check
Put in your own numbers and see what phone, email and SMS orders, re-keying and credits cost your business a year.
4:45am. Sixty emails, a dozen voicemails and a photo of a handwritten list in the order inbox. The trucks leave at 6.If that is your morning, this is for you.
- Built for wholesalers supplying restaurants, cafés, pubs, clubs and hotels
- Your figures stay in your browser
- Full breakdown plus the 7-leak playbook when you want it
Your order desk
Example numbers. Change them to yours.M&J Chickens was losing the same money. Here is what they did.
A $170m+ poultry wholesaler with a big book of restaurant accounts. Orders came in by email, phone and voicemail, and their previous ordering app had under 10% adoption. They moved app, web and email orders into one ERP-connected workflow on Open Pantry, with AI reading the email orders. Pick, pack, invoicing and delivery stayed exactly as they were.
“Open Pantry has revolutionized our order management by eliminating manual processing and integrating flawlessly with our existing systems.”Alex Ortiz, Head of Sales, M&J ChickensRead the M&J case study
The seven places an order desk leaks money
The calculator covers three of them. The playbook walks through all seven, with the fix for each.
- Re-keying email, SMS and voicemail ordersSomeone types every order twice, usually before sunrise.
- Orders that miss cut-offThe late ones get squeezed onto the run, or wait a day.
- Credits, shorts and wrong subs"The usual but less" gets guessed, and the credit lands on Friday.
- Reps taking orders instead of sellingYour best salespeople spend their mornings as order-takers.
- Price list and catch-weight errorsContract pricing keyed by hand drifts, and per-kg lines get invoiced wrong.
- Invoices going out a day lateEvery day between delivery and invoice is a day longer to get paid.
- Venues that quietly stop orderingNobody notices until the account has gone to someone else.
How the Leak Check works
How much does it cost a food wholesaler to key in orders by hand?
Multiply the orders that arrive by phone, email, SMS or PDF each week by the minutes it takes to key one in, divide by 60 and multiply by your hourly cost, then by 52. A wholesaler taking 1,050 manual orders a week at 4 minutes each and $42 an hour spends about $152,880 a year on re-keying alone, before credits and rep time.
What counts as a manual order?
Any order someone on your team has to read and type into your system: emails, SMS and WhatsApp messages, voicemails, phone calls, PDFs and photos of handwritten lists. Orders placed in an ordering app or web shop that flow straight into your system are not manual.
Why do manual orders cause credits?
Every time an order is retyped it can be misread: the wrong pack size, the wrong product substituted, a quantity guessed from "the usual but less". Each mistake becomes a credit note, a redelivery or an unhappy chef. The calculator uses the share of manual orders that need a fix and your average cost per fix.
How do wholesalers cut order entry time?
Two ways, usually together. Give customers a branded ordering app or web shop so repeat orders come in clean, and use AI order entry to turn the emails, SMS and PDFs that still arrive into structured orders for review before cut-off.
What did M&J Chickens do?
M&J Chickens, a poultry wholesaler with $170m+ annual turnover, moved app, web and email orders into one ERP-connected workflow on Open Pantry, with AI reading the email orders. Their previous ordering app had under 10% adoption. They now run 31,000 orders a month through Open Pantry, and their pick, pack, invoicing and delivery processes stayed the same.
Is the Leak Check free, and what happens to my details?
Yes. The calculator runs in your browser. If you ask for the full breakdown and playbook, we keep your name, business, email and your yearly total so Geoff can follow up, and you can unsubscribe from any email.
From Geoff Philcox, founder of Open Pantry
I sold into hospitality for years, looking after 800 trade accounts in London and fit-outs across Auckland, then ran a food-service business of my own. I built Open Pantry because the order desk was the one part of a wholesaler nobody had fixed.