Brakeman Cycles

“We are not really an e-commerce business. We sell handlebar grips to 200 bike shops on net-30 terms. Most CRMs assume every account is a credit-card customer. Tonic Desk lets us model the actual trade relationship.”

— Tom Brakeman, Founder, Brakeman Cycles

$4.1K saved per year

Unlimited supplier records

Net-30 terms on every account

Brakeman Cycles is a wholesale distributor of cycling accessories, supplying around 200 independent bike shops across the UK and Ireland. After three years on Zoho CRM the team needed a system that understood B2B trade accounts, net-30 terms, and recurring supplier reorders. They migrated to Tonic Desk last spring.

01

Before — a consumer CRM jammed into wholesale

Brakeman's Zoho instance had been retrofitted for B2B by stacking custom modules and Deluge scripts written by a freelancer the founder met at a trade show. The team tracked credit limits, payment terms, and supplier lead times — but every report broke when Zoho rolled out an update, and the cost of the Plus tier had crept to $11,400 a year for seven users plus a separate Airtable subscription for the supplier side that the Zoho data model could not handle.

The team had also outgrown Zoho's contact-record limits on supplier data. Every additional supplier-side contact (a sales rep, a logistics coordinator, an accounts contact, a brand manager for new SKU launches) required either a workaround or a tier upgrade. The ops lead was spending half a day a week reconciling Airtable supplier records against Zoho customer-facing orders.

02

The switch — wholesale, modelled correctly

The Brakeman ops lead spent a Saturday morning exporting customers, suppliers, products, and open orders from Zoho and Airtable. Tonic Desk imported the customer side directly via the standard CRM importer. The supplier side mapped to a new Suppliers account type — the same underlying data model as customers, but with credit terms flipped (Brakeman owes them, not the other way around) and a different field set for lead times and minimum order quantities.

Unlimited supplier contacts. No tier upgrade. The Zoho Deluge automations rebuilt as native Tonic Desk workflows in an afternoon — the ops lead, who had never written code, did most of the rebuild herself using the visual workflow editor. The migration cost nothing and finished before lunch on the Sunday.

03

The workflow — net-30 on every account

Every Brakeman customer record now carries a Trade terms field — Net-30, Net-60, COD, or Prepay — alongside a credit limit and a current balance pulled from the accounting integration. Sales reps see, on every account, whether a fresh order will breach the credit limit before they place it. The system blocks order entry on accounts that are 7+ days overdue until the ops team approves an exception.

Recurring reorder workflows fire 14 days before a shop's typical reorder cadence, populated with last-quarter's order pattern as a suggestion. Supplier-side, the same engine flags low-stock SKUs against the lead time of the relevant supplier so the buying team has visibility before a stock-out becomes a customer service problem. The team has not run out of a fast-mover (grips, tyres, brake pads) since the switch.

04

Results — savings and a more honest pipeline

Annual licence saving: $4,100 across the seat fee, the Deluge consulting retainer, and the Airtable subscription the team had been using for the supplier side. More usefully, the pipeline now reflects how a wholesale business actually works rather than pretending the team sells handlebars to consumers.

The accounting integration is real-time rather than nightly. The sales team sees true credit exposure before they pitch a new SKU into a shop. The ops team sees true supplier lead times before they promise a customer a delivery date. The founder says the team have stopped describing the CRM as "the necessary evil" and started describing it as "the source of truth", which is the first time anyone has used that phrase about a Brakeman system without irony.

Brakeman Cycles

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