Wholesale Operations

If you're only selling to the person standing at your counter, you're leaving money on the table. A lot of cigar shops also supply other businesses — restaurants, bars, golf clubs, other retailers. TORO handles the wholesale side right alongside your retail operations, so you're not juggling two separate systems.

Wholesale vs. Retail in TORO

Wholesale accounts are still regular TORO accounts — they just have wholesale settings turned on. That means you get the same customer management, purchase history, and reporting you're used to, plus the tools you need for B2B: invoicing, payment tracking, credit terms, and tiered pricing.

The key differences come down to how you get paid and what you charge. Retail customers pay at the register and walk out. Wholesale customers order in bulk, get invoiced, and pay you later. The margins are thinner, but the volume makes up for it.

Setting Up a Wholesale Account

Start by creating a new account (or converting an existing one) with the wholesale designation. From there:

• Assign a pricing tier. Wholesale customers don't pay retail. Set up pricing tiers so they automatically get wholesale rates, volume discounts, or whatever structure you've agreed on.

• Configure credit terms. Net 15, Net 30, whatever you've negotiated. This determines when payment is expected after invoicing.

• Set a credit limit if you want to cap how much they can owe at any given time. This is optional but smart, especially for new accounts. Trust is great, but a credit limit is better.

Creating Invoices

The invoicing workflow is straightforward:

1. Process the order as a transaction or through the wholesale module

2. Select Invoice as the payment method

3. TORO generates the invoice with all the order details, pricing, and payment terms

4. Print it or email it directly to the customer. Emailed invoices automatically include a spreadsheet (CSV) of the line items, with a totals row, so your customer can drop the order straight into their own system.

5. The amount goes onto their account as a receivable

Printing an invoice. Choose View & Print and the invoice opens in your browser — press Ctrl+P from there. You don't need to change any print settings: the coloured header and total bars print as they should, and on a plain black-and-white printer they come out near-black so the white text on them stays sharp. (Older versions needed you to find and tick "Background graphics" in the print dialog, or those bars printed blank.)

That's it. The invoice tracks what they owe, and you can follow up as needed.

No email on the account? Not a problem. Plenty of wholesale accounts are phone-and-paper only. If the account has no email address on file, TORO tells you and asks whether you'd like to add one — answer Yes and it takes you straight into Wholesale Account Information, where you add the address on a Contacts row. Answer No and you carry on as normal: you can still view and print the invoice, and you can type an address by hand on the email screen under Add Email Manually.

A typo in one contact's address? If an account has several contacts and one of their addresses isn't usable, TORO still emails everyone else and then shows you a list of the ones it couldn't send to, along with the address it tried — enough to spot the typo and fix it on the account. Contacts with no address at all aren't listed; they're simply skipped.

Smart Reordering: Analytic Invoices

Instead of building a wholesale order by hand, let TORO suggest one. From the Wholesale module, click Create New Analytic Invoice (it's also available as a tile on the Dashboard). Pick a wholesale account and TORO pulls everything that account has ordered over your chosen date range — defaulting to the last year — works out how fast each item sells for them, and suggests how many boxes to reorder to cover a period you set with Order for [ ] days.

Use the Rounding control to round the suggested counts up or down. Every suggested quantity is editable in the Order column, ONE OF EACH drops one of every item onto the order, and BUILD INVOICE turns the whole thing into a wholesale invoice with that account's pricing already applied. It's the fastest way to reorder for a regular account without forgetting the slow movers they still expect to see.

Customizing the Invoice

You control what shows on the invoice. From the Wholesale module's Settings screen, open Invoice Appearance to toggle line-item details — Show Brand Name and Show Wholesale License Number — and pick exactly which of your store's From fields and the customer's Bill-To fields (name, address, phone, website, tax ID, rep, and so on) appear on the printed and emailed invoice.

Special Taxes on Wholesale Invoices

If your state applies a tobacco or OTP special tax to wholesale sales, you can have TORO add it to every wholesale invoice automatically instead of remembering it each time.

On the Wholesale module's Settings screen, click Special Taxes on Invoices. The window shows two lists — Available Special Taxes on the left and Applied to Wholesale Invoices on the right — with Add >> and << Remove between them. Anything you move to the right is added to every wholesale invoice as its own line item, so it appears separately rather than being buried in the item prices.

Two things worth being clear about:

• This doesn't change any retail price. Choosing a special tax here only affects wholesale invoices. Your over-the-counter prices are untouched.
• You create the tax elsewhere. This screen only picks from taxes that already exist — setting one up is done under Pricing & Tax. If the tax you want isn't in the left-hand list, it hasn't been created yet.

On the invoice itself. The special-tax line always sits at the bottom, below your items, shipping and any discount, and it looks after itself — change a quantity, add an item, remove one, and the tax updates to match. Because TORO works it out for you, the line can't be edited or deleted: if you try, it will tell you so and point you at the account's exemption setting instead. Dragging it up the list won't stick either — it drops back to the bottom.

Each applicable tax gets its own line, named after the tax, so an invoice carrying two of them shows two lines rather than one lumped total. That's deliberate — it's what makes the invoice reconcile when you file.

Which price the tax is worked out on depends on how the tax itself was set up under Pricing & Tax. A tax set to apply to the wholesale price uses the Original Unit Cost — what you paid — so the margin you add for that customer doesn't increase the tax. A tax set to apply to retail uses the Unit Cost column, the marked-up price the customer is actually billed.

Exempting an account. Some wholesale customers hold their own licence and shouldn't be charged the special tax. Open the account and tick Exempt From Special Taxes — invoices for that account skip the special-tax lines while everyone else's still get them. Tick or untick it on an open invoice and the lines appear or disappear the next time you change something on it.

Getting Paid

This is where a lot of shops get sloppy with wholesale — they send invoices and then lose track. TORO won't let that happen if you use it.

View open invoices for any customer at any time. You can see exactly what's outstanding, when it was invoiced, and when payment is due.

Record payments as they come in. If a customer sends a check for $2,000 against a $3,500 invoice, record the partial payment. TORO tracks the remaining balance automatically.

Mark invoices as paid when fully collected. Clean books, no guesswork.

Aging reports are your best friend. They break down receivables into buckets — current, 30 days past due, 60 days, 90+ days. When you see an invoice sitting in the 60-day column, it's time for a phone call. Don't let accounts age quietly.

The Payments Report

Sooner or later someone asks the question the individual account screens can't answer: a payment showed up on a report — which account was it for? The Payments Report answers it.

Open the Wholesale module, go to Reporting, and choose Payments Report. It lists every wholesale payment across every account, one row per payment, with the account name right there in the first column.

It opens showing the first of the current month through today, which is usually what you want. Change the start date, and set an end date if you need a closed window — or leave the end date empty and it keeps running through today, so a payment taken this morning is never cut off.

Two filters narrow it down:

• Account — start on ALL WHOLESALE ACCOUNTS and pick one when you want to see just their payments. Inactive accounts are in the list too, since they can still have payments in an older date range.
• Payment Method — cash, check, card, or trade. The list only offers methods your shop has actually used for wholesale, so you'll never pick one that returns nothing.

Above the table you'll see Count and Total for exactly the rows on screen. Change a filter and both update.

A note on invoices vs. payments. An invoice being invoiced on a given day doesn't mean money came in that day. If a store report shows wholesale activity for a date but your register receipt for that night doesn't show a matching payment, that's usually the explanation — the invoice went out that day and the check arrived later. Run the Payments Report over a wider date range and you'll find when it actually landed.

Price Sheets

If you've got sales reps or wholesale customers who need a printed list of what you offer and at what price, TORO can generate price sheets. You can create different sheets for different pricing tiers and email or print them as needed. When prices change, update the sheet and send the new version.

Accounts Receivable at a Glance

The accounts receivable view gives you a dashboard of everything owed to you. Total AR balance, broken down by customer and by age. This is the report you should be looking at weekly — maybe daily if wholesale is a big part of your business.

A healthy AR looks like mostly current balances with very little in the 60+ day columns. If your 90-day bucket is growing, you've got a collections problem that needs attention before it becomes a cash flow problem.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Invoice payments don't go through the drawer. Wholesale payments are recorded separately from your register transactions. This keeps your daily drawer reconciliation clean and your wholesale accounting accurate.

Reports separate wholesale and retail. You can see exactly how much revenue comes from each channel, what the margins look like, and which wholesale accounts are most profitable. Keep a close eye on this — wholesale margins are thinner by nature, and a high-volume account that's paying late or returning a lot can quietly become unprofitable.

Tax-exempt accounts are common in wholesale. Resellers often have tax-exempt status. You can configure this per account in TORO so tax is automatically excluded from their invoices. Just make sure you have their exemption certificate on file.

Monitor margins carefully. It's easy to get excited about a big wholesale order and forget that you're making half the margin you would on retail. That's fine if the volume justifies it. But keep an eye on the numbers — a wholesale account that buys a lot and pays late might be costing you more than it's earning.

Wholesale can be a serious revenue stream for cigar shops that do it right. The key is treating it like a real operation — proper invoicing, prompt follow-up on payments, and clear-eyed analysis of which accounts are actually worth the effort. TORO gives you the tools. The discipline is up to you.