HACCP-grade traceability for teams of two to twenty.
Between a spreadsheet and enterprise software built for a plant with a compliance department sits a large gap. OakNex gives a small food or beverage producer the traceability, recipes and paperwork of a much larger operation, scaled and priced for a small team.
Common challenges
Receiving is a delivery note stapled to a printed spreadsheet, when it is recorded at all. The recipe lives in someone's head, or in a document that has been the "final" version for two years. On-hand quantities are uncertain until someone walks the room and counts. And when a customer or an auditor asks where a batch came from, answering it means a few hours with several spreadsheets open and the dates lining up.
This is a common position for a small manufacturer that has grown past what a spreadsheet can track but has not yet adopted a system built for that size. Most food software targets a facility with a QA department and a compliance officer, or it is a generic inventory tool with no concept of a lot number, a batch or an expiry date.
How OakNex maps to your day
Receiving ties supplier, lot and expiry together at the door via a goods receipt, before the pallet moves an inch — the record an auditor actually wants. Production runs on a versioned recipe with its own routing, consuming raw-material lots via FEFO-default picking and writing every consumption to the same audited movement ledger as everything else — including any waste, logged against the batch that produced it rather than absorbed into an unexplained shrinkage number. Every one of those movements is traceable both directions, which is what turns a recall from a scramble into a search.
On the commercial side, purchasing raises reorder suggestions before you're short, and sales and invoicing carries quotes through orders, shipments and EU VAT-aware invoices — domestic, intra-EU or export treatment applied per customer, EN 16931 e-invoices generated where required, receivables tracked so you know what's actually outstanding. If you also sell online, Shopify orders import automatically and inventory stays in sync without a second system to reconcile against the first.
Behind all of it, a monthly stocktake session is a numbered document that reconciles counted stock against system on-hand and posts the adjustment when you close it, and a kiosk PIN mode lets shop-floor staff log production without a full user login — small pieces, but the kind that add up to a team of two to twenty actually trusting the numbers the system shows them.
Every corner of food and beverage has its own wrinkle on top of that backbone. If yours is fermentation and litre-scaled batches, see kombucha or craft beverage. If it's a short shelf life and returnable bottles, see kefir & fermented dairy. If you're outside food entirely but still batch-and-recipe driven, see cosmetics — the core traceability and recipe engine is the same, tuned to what's distinct about your product.
Who this isn't for
If you're running a large plant with automated lines, SCADA-integrated equipment and a dedicated compliance department, OakNex is undersized for you — that's a different category of software with a different price tag. It's also not accounting, HR or CRM software, and it doesn't run a public API or mobile apps today. It's built for the small manufacturer squarely between "spreadsheet" and "enterprise plant system," which is most food and beverage producers under about twenty people.
Frequently asked questions
Answers to the questions we hear most often.
What size of producer is OakNex actually built for?
Teams of roughly two to twenty people making a physical, batch-produced product — food, drink, or something adjacent like cosmetics. Small enough that a spreadsheet used to be enough, big enough that it isn't anymore: multiple people touching stock, multiple SKUs, real regulatory paperwork to produce on demand.
How fast could I actually run a recall drill?
Every stock movement — receipt, production consumption, shipment, return — is tied to a lot and the document that caused it. Pull a raw-material lot and trace it forward to every finished batch and every shipment it touched in one search, or start from a customer complaint and trace backward to the supplier lot behind it. That's the drill: minutes, not a day of spreadsheet cross-referencing.
Does OakNex replace our accounting software?
No — it handles sales and purchase documents, EU VAT calculation across domestic, intra-EU and export treatment, EN 16931 e-invoices, and receivables tracking, but it isn't a general ledger or an accounting system. Most producers export from OakNex into their accountant's tools rather than replacing them.
Which industry page is closest to what we do?
If fermentation, batch recipes and lot traceability sound like your day, start with whichever of kombucha, kefir & fermented dairy, craft beverage or cosmetics matches your product — the core is the same across all of them, just tuned to what's distinct about your corner of it.
Stop wrestling spreadsheets. Start running your shop.
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