Your ERP has the data. Your team still uses Excel to find it.
AI-backed sales dashboard pulling directly from your ERP. Real-time visibility by country, customer, and SKU. Live in 10 business days.
Work-Smart builds sales dashboards for distribution and CPG companies that pull directly from your ERP, no pivot tables, no hours of filtering. Real-time visibility by country, customer, SKU, and salesperson. AI anomaly detection flags unusual patterns. Dashboard live in 10 business days.
Fixed-Fee Implementation•Dashboard Live in 10 Business Days•Built From Your ERP (Read-Only)
You know the data exists. It's in Sage. Every transaction, every invoice, every shipment. Thirty years of it.
The problem isn't missing data. The problem is that the data is trapped inside an ERP that doesn't speak to anything else. So your team built pivot tables. They connected to Sage via queries, built views for every dimension, sales by country, by customer, by SKU, by product line, by salesperson, and it works. It's worked for years. But "works" and "works fast enough to make decisions" are two different things.
You can't answer leadership questions in real time.
When someone asks "how are we doing this month in the Caribbean?" the answer takes filtering, rebuilding, and waiting. By the time the pivot refreshes, the meeting has moved on. The CEO gets stale data or no data. Decisions happen on instinct instead of numbers.
You can't share one version of the truth across the team.
Each person has their own pivot file. Their filters are different. Their date ranges are different. Two people pull the same report and get different numbers. Nobody is wrong, they're just looking at different slices. But when leadership asks a question, they get three answers.
The reports break when you scale.
A distributor with 200 SKUs can manage in Excel. A distributor with thousands of SKUs across multiple countries, dozens of customers, and a sales team spread across regions, the pivots become unmanageable. Every new product line means new tabs. Every new market means new filters. The system that got you here can't get you to the next level.
You've tried to fix this before.
Most distribution companies I talk to have already invested time and money in a BI platform or a dashboard project. The vendor connected to the data, built something, and it was slow. Or it didn't match the numbers in Sage. Or it took four months and still wasn't usable. The frustration isn't with the concept, it's with the execution.
The ERP has the data. The gap is visibility.
This is the story I hear from every distributor: the ERP has the data, the team has the Excel skills, but the gap between "data exists" and "leadership can see what's happening right now" is costing real money.
CPG Export Distributor. Miami
One CPG distributor based in Miami operates across multiple export markets. They've been running their analytics through Excel pivots connected to their on-prem ERP for over a decade.
The Ask
"I want a snapshot of my operation. Sales by country, by client, by SKU, by product line, by vendor. In dollars and in cases. Something fast. Something I can trust."
They'd already spent 3-4 months with another vendor. The output was slow, didn't match the numbers leadership trusted, and wasn't usable day to day.
What We Built: Phase 1 Sales Performance Dashboard
A custom web dashboard built directly from Sage (read-only connection, no disruptions to the ERP). The team opens a browser, logs in, and sees:
- Total sales, monthly sales, and year-to-date sales, updated daily
- Breakdowns by country, customer, SKU, product line, and salesperson
- Sales in both dollars and cases/boxes
- Daily and weekly trend lines showing growth or decline
- Top customers and top SKUs ranked by volume
- Fast filters on every view with CSV export
The dashboard loads in seconds. Not minutes. Not after a pivot refresh. Seconds. Built from the source system, not from exported pivot files, the numbers match because they come from the same place leadership already trusts.
What Comes Next: The AI Layer
Daily or weekly "what changed and why" reports
Pattern detection delivered by email that surfaces what the team might miss in thousands of SKUs.
Spikes or drops flagged automatically
By market, SKU, customer, or salesperson, before they compound into problems.
On-hand stock tracking with restocking signals
High impact when managing thousands of items across multiple markets.
"What to buy" recommendations
Based on historical patterns, seasonality, and current velocity.
This is the sequence: data first, visibility second, intelligence third. The dashboard creates the foundation. The AI uses it.
You should work with me if you're:
A distributor, exporter, or CPG company with 20-200 employees.
You have enough transaction volume and SKU complexity that Excel is becoming a bottleneck, but not so much that you need an enterprise BI platform with a six-figure license.
Running a $5M-$100M operation across multiple markets.
Whether it's domestic regions or international. Caribbean, Latin America, multi-state, you need visibility by geography, customer, and product line. The more markets you serve, the harder it is to see the whole picture in a spreadsheet.
Dependent on an on-premise ERP (Sage, SAP Business One, NetSuite, QuickBooks Enterprise).
Your data lives in a system that wasn't designed for modern analytics. You can't just plug in a SaaS dashboard, you need someone who understands how to extract data from legacy systems without disrupting operations.
Managing 500+ SKUs across dozens or hundreds of customers.
At this complexity, pivot tables break. Filtering by country, then by customer, then by product line, then by SKU means you're spending more time navigating data than using it.
Frustrated with a prior analytics project that didn't deliver.
You've already tried. The vendor was slow. The numbers didn't match. The output wasn't usable. You want someone who can build in 10 days what someone else couldn't build in 4 months.
The diagnostic is a fixed fee. You find out how your ERP data is structured, what can be extracted, and what the dashboard should show. For many distribution companies, the diagnostic and the first dashboard build happen together.
A Phase 1 dashboard (sales analytics from your ERP) is typically the fastest way to replace your Excel pivots with something your entire team can use. Delivery in 10 business days.
A full data consolidation plus dashboard plus AI layer is a fixed-fee build scoped from the diagnostic. Most distribution builds spread over 2-4 months.
You pay as deliverables ship. Dashboard live → you pay for the dashboard. AI layer built → you pay for the AI layer. No hourly billing. No open-ended retainers before you see results.
| Option | Cost | Timeline | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise BI (Tableau, Power BI, Looker) | $50K to $200K/year | 3-6 months | Designed for companies 10x your size |
| BI consulting firm | $100K to $300K | 6 months | You get a roadmap, not a dashboard |
| The other vendor | Months of cost | 4 months | Still not usable |
| Work-Smart | $5K to $50K | 10 business days | Working dashboard from your ERP. You own it. |
10 business days from kickoff to live dashboard.
Access and Baseline
We connect to your ERP (read-only, we never write to your system). You provide one IT contact for Sage access setup and a baseline report you already trust, the sales report you use today. We confirm the numbers match before building anything.
Data Extraction and Structuring
We pull your sales data from Sage via SQL or ODBC. Transactions, customers, products, countries, salespeople. We structure it into a clean database optimized for fast queries. Your 30 years of pivot tables become a structured data layer that loads in seconds.
Dashboard Build
The web dashboard goes up. Sales by every dimension you need, country, customer, SKU, product line, salesperson. In dollars and in cases. MTD, YTD, trends. Filters on everything. CSV export for when your team still wants to play in Excel.
Validation and Handoff
We validate the numbers against your baseline report. If they don't match, we fix them before launch. Short training session with your team. Go live.
What Comes Next
Once the Phase 1 dashboard is live, you decide what to add. Inventory tracking. AI-powered anomaly detection. Purchasing suggestions. A CRM that connects your sales team's customer interactions to the transaction data. Each addition builds on the structured data layer that's already in place.
You've probably thought about this before.
"We tried a BI project and it went nowhere."
One distributor ran a 4-month BI initiative. No result. The problem wasn't the tool, it was that their data lived in an on-prem ERP and Excel pivot tables with no integration layer. I start with data consolidation. When the dashboard goes live, it reads from a clean, structured source.
"Our ERP is on-premise and old. Can AI even work with that?"
Yes. Sage, QuickBooks, NetSuite, the system connects to what you have. You don't need to replace your ERP. I build the intelligence layer on top of it.
The AI Operating System. Applied to Your Industry
ERP Data, Made Usable
Your ERP data structured and accessible outside the ERP. Sales transactions, inventory levels, purchase orders, customer records, product catalogs, consolidated into a format that dashboards, automations, and AI can use. Not replacing Sage. Building a read layer on top of it that makes everything else usable.
Daily Sales Dashboard
A live dashboard the VP of Sales or CEO opens every morning. Sales by country, by customer, by product line, current as of last night's refresh. Trend lines that show which markets are growing and which are declining. Top SKUs. Top customers. No more rebuilding pivot tables before every meeting.
Product & Customer Intelligence
An AI assistant that understands your product catalog, your customer history, your pricing, and your sales patterns. Your team asks it questions: "Which customers haven't reordered in 60 days?" "What's our margin on product line X by market?" Answers in seconds from your data, not from the internet.
Governed Sales Operations
Workflows that replace manual sales operations. Automated reorder alerts when inventory hits thresholds. Daily sales summaries delivered to leadership. Customer follow-up triggers when purchase patterns change. Exception reports that flag anomalies, a customer who usually orders $50K/month suddenly orders $5K.
Data & AI Policy
AI use policies for your sales team. If your account managers are using ChatGPT to draft customer communications or analyze pricing, you need to know. Approved tools, data boundaries, and monitoring, protecting your pricing data and customer intelligence from leaking into public AI tools.
Market Authority
Your distribution company appears when prospects ask AI about CPG distribution in your region. Your expertise, your product lines, your market coverage, structured so AI search engines recommend you. This layer comes after the internal foundation is solid.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. We connect via read-only SQL or ODBC depending on your ERP configuration. We don't change anything in the ERP, we just read the data. Your IT person sets up the access in 1-2 hours. If your Excel pivots can connect, we can too.
The typical failure pattern: the vendor spent months connecting to data, the numbers didn't match what leadership trusted, and the output was too slow to use. We start with your baseline report, the numbers you already trust, and validate against it before going live. If the numbers don't match, we fix the connection, not the expectation. That's why we deliver in 10 days, not 4 months.
Yes. The approach works with any ERP that has a database or API. Sage, SAP Business One, NetSuite, QuickBooks Enterprise, SYSPRO, Acumatica. The connection method varies. The outcome is the same: your ERP data in a fast, filterable dashboard your team actually uses.
Inventory on-hand is Phase 2. Phase 1 focuses on sales performance because it's the highest-value, fastest-to-deliver view. Inventory, returns/credits, margin analysis, and purchasing suggestions are add-on modules built on the same data layer. Each one typically adds 1-2 weeks and $3K-$8K depending on complexity.
A small monthly maintenance fee covers daily refresh monitoring, fixing connection issues if ERP updates break something, performance tuning if the dashboard slows down as data grows, and minor adjustments (new filters, label changes, small layout tweaks). Larger changes, new dashboards, AI modules, inventory tracking, are scoped separately.
Yes. One distributor had thousands of SKUs tracked across Excel pivot tables with no analytics layer. The dashboard consolidated everything into a searchable, filterable view with real-time margin data. Monthly reporting dropped from 65 hours to 2 hours.
Yes. A 40-year-old packaging manufacturer operating in 4 countries needed multilingual capability and multi-country routing. The system handles multi-geography, multi-language, and multi-currency. The data layer respects regional differences while giving headquarters a unified view.
Most distributors I talk to have the same setup. Sage holds the data. Excel shows it, slowly. Leadership makes decisions on reports that are already stale.
The first step is a 30-minute call where I ask about your ERP, your current reporting, your team's pain points, and what you want to see. Then I tell you honestly what it would take, timeline, cost, and whether it makes sense for your operation. If the answer is a Phase 1 dashboard, it's a fixed-fee build delivered in 10 business days. If it's a broader data consolidation with AI, I'll scope that specifically. Either way, you'll know exactly what you're buying before you commit.