This is not Shopify customer support software. Tonic Desk is the CRM for brands that sell B2B alongside DTC — wholesale accounts on net-30 terms, purchase orders flowing through a pipeline, supplier records on the other side, and credit limits that stop a £40k order from shipping to a customer four invoices overdue.
Shopify and the consumer CRMs assume one human, one credit card, one order. B2B is a wholesale buyer with a procurement team, a PO number, net-30 terms, a credit limit, and 14 orders a year. The retail tooling has no concept of any of that — so the B2B side gets run from spreadsheets.
A standard sales CRM models a sale as a one-off won deal. A wholesale PO is a recurring order that lands every six weeks, ships against a forecast, and changes scope on the day. Forcing each PO through a one-shot funnel loses the repeat pattern and breaks demand planning.
You buy from 40 suppliers. Lead times, MOQs, payment terms, FOB ports — all live in a Google Sheet the operations manager owns. When that person goes on leave, the team cannot answer "when is the next container from Vendor X due?" without a Slack thread.
A trade customer has not paid the last three invoices. The accounts team flagged it three weeks ago. Sales did not see the flag, took a new £40k order, and shipped it on the same net-30 terms. The customer files for administration two weeks later. The brand eats the loss.
Create wholesale customers as Company records with custom fields for trading name, PO required (yes/no), payment terms (net-7, net-30, net-60, pro forma), credit limit, current outstanding balance, and FOB destination. Contacts inside the company carry roles — buyer, accounts payable, head of merchandise — so the right person receives the right communication automatically.
A Purchase orders pipeline (Forecast, PO received, In production, In transit, Received, Invoiced, Paid) models the full cycle. Each PO records SKU quantities, unit costs, ship date, and expected receipt. Recurring orders clone from the previous one, with the operations team adjusting quantity against the forecast. Reports show pipeline value by ship-week — feeding into demand planning, not just sales forecasting.
Create Suppliers as a separate Company type with custom fields for MOQ, lead time (days), payment terms to supplier, primary port, secondary port, and quality rating. Inbound POs (yours-to-them) live on a Supplier purchase orders pipeline. The CRM holds both sides of the trading relationship in one workspace — your customer ledger and your supplier ledger, side by side.
Each wholesale account carries a credit limit and a live outstanding balance (synced from the accounting system via integration). A workflow blocks the Order shipped stage if the next order would push the customer past their limit, and notifies sales and finance. Sales can request an override; the override creates an audit log entry. The £40k shipment to a customer four invoices overdue stops happening.