Production and inventory control built around dairy shelf life.

Common challenges

Stock dates are checked by eye each morning because the spreadsheet was last updated several days ago. A wholesale account receives a case closer to its sell-by date than it should be because the picker took what was nearest the door rather than what was oldest. The monthly count takes a full day with a clipboard, and the numbers rarely reconcile with what the books say should be on hand.

Returnable glass adds further complexity — deposits owed, deposits refunded, and which customer paid which rate — on top of running a product with almost no margin for error on freshness. A business producing daily on a short shelf-life clock needs the system to carry that discipline rather than relying on an individual to remember it.

How OakNex maps to your day

Every batch is a lot with an expiry date the moment it's produced. Picking — for a production run consuming raw milk and culture, or for a shipment going out the door — defaults to first-expired-first-out, so the oldest good stock moves first without anyone having to remember to check. A standing list on the dashboard flags lots expiring soon, before they become a write-off.

For a business shipping the same accounts on a set cadence, recurring order templates generate tomorrow's sales order without retyping it, and production draws on the same recipe and routing each cycle. Returnable bottle deposits are configured once per destination and apply automatically on quotes, orders and invoices, with the right VAT treatment and an automatic refund when the empties and a credit note come back. Wholesale invoicing runs through EU VAT-aware invoicing — domestic, intra-EU or export treatment applied per customer, EN 16931 e-invoices where they're required — so a mixed local-and-EU customer base doesn't mean manually working out VAT on every invoice.

And when the monthly count comes around, a stocktake session records what you counted, reconciles it against system on-hand, and posts the adjustment as a numbered document you can point to later — the same shape as the inventarizācijas akts most Latvian producers already run, just without the separate spreadsheet.

If you produce in one room and cold-store in another, or run a satellite drop point, on-hand is tracked per location, not just per item, and stock moving between them goes through an instant transfer or a send/receive transfer with its own numbered document — so what left the dairy and what arrived at the cold store is provable, not a phone call and a guess. And because every movement — receipt, production consumption, transfer, shipment — is tied to the same lot, a wholesale account asking "which batch was our last delivery" gets an immediate answer instead of a search through delivery notes.

Who this isn't for

If your dairy line runs on automated CIP cycles and in-line sensors reporting fill weights and temperatures to a plant SCADA system, that integration isn't something we do — OakNex plans and records production and inventory, it doesn't talk to hardware. It's built for a team that's still hands-on with the batch and the bottling line, and wants the paperwork and the cold-chain discipline to keep up with them.