Keep entrée. Stop keying invoices into it.
entrée has run your distribution business for years — catch weight, pricing, traceability, all of it. What it has never done is read a supplier invoice. Harold does that part, checks it against your rules, and hands entrée a clean, mapped file.
Why distributors stay on entrée
NECS has been building for food distribution since 1987, and roughly 1,500 distributors run their operations on it. That longevity is not inertia — it is a system that genuinely fits the trade.
Catch weight is native, not bolted on
entrée was designed around variable-weight product from the start. Ordered cases versus shipped pounds, pricing per pound against pricing per case — the model handles it because the trade demanded it, not because a generic ERP added a field.
Pricing depth generic ERP can't match
Customer-specific pricing on every item, pricing levels tied to current cost or profit percentage, special agreements per account. That flexibility is why distributors who've tried moving to a horizontal ERP come back.
Traceability built for the regulation
Lot tracking and FSMA 204 traceability are part of the core system, not a compliance bolt-on you buy separately and reconcile afterwards.
Decades of trade knowledge in the defaults
Broadline, specialty, seafood, meat, produce, DSD — the workflows reflect how these businesses actually operate. New staff learn a process that already matches the job.
The one job entrée was never built for
entrée is a system of record. It is superb at holding, pricing and moving your data once the data is in it. What no distribution ERP does — not entrée, not any of its competitors — is read the PDF a supplier emailed you at 6am and understand that "BEEF BRISKET PKD 4/12.5LB CW" contains a pack quantity of 4, a nominal weight of 12.5 pounds and a catch-weight flag.
So somebody types it. Every line, every day. And because catch-weight lines carry more numbers than a normal invoice line, they take longer and go wrong more often. A transposed weight doesn't announce itself — it lands quietly in your cost of goods and shows up six weeks later as a margin you can't explain.
That is not a failure of entrée. It is a job outside its remit. It is the job Harold does.
Enhance it, don't replace it
The instinct when a manual process hurts is to assume the system is the problem and start an ERP selection. For a distributor on entrée, that is almost always the wrong call. You would spend six figures and eighteen months replacing software that fits your trade, to acquire document capture you could have added in an afternoon.
Worse, the replacement usually doesn't fix it. Horizontal ERP platforms handle catch weight less well than entrée does, and their document capture still needs training per supplier. You'd take on migration risk, retraining and a worse pricing engine to solve a problem that was never in the ERP layer.
Harold sits alongside entrée. Your suppliers change nothing, your staff change nothing, entrée changes nothing. Only the typing goes away.
How Harold works with entrée
Train Harold on your suppliers
Drop in a few invoices from a supplier. Harold reads them and you highlight where the values sit — pack quantity, weight per case, unit — even when they're buried inside a description line. Under ten minutes per supplier, then it repeats.
Your rules run before anything leaves
Harold recalculates totals, checks extended prices against catch weights, matches supplier and GL codes to your own reference data, and flags anything that doesn't reconcile. Bad data gets stopped here, not discovered in month-end.
Clean data, in entrée's format
Harold outputs the validated result mapped to the columns entrée expects, ready to import. Where you have development resource, NECS offers an API service that third-party applications use to write into entrée data — Harold's output feeds that path too.
Why food distributors choose Harold
Catch weight is the reason Harold exists
Most document tools read a table and give you the cells. Harold pulls multiple values out of a single description field — pack quantity here, unit weight there — and lets you build formulas like total pounds equals cases multiplied by pounds per case.
You define the rules, not a vendor
Your output columns, your validation flags, your mappings. Harold follows the structure entrée already uses instead of asking you to accept somebody else's schema.
No entrée project required
Nothing is installed into entrée, no version upgrade, no consultant engagement, no downtime. If Harold doesn't suit you, you stop using it and entrée is exactly as it was.
Free to start, no paywall
Full features from day one, no credit card. Train it on your three worst suppliers and see whether the output is good enough before you spend anything.
Common questions
Does Harold replace NECS entrée?
No. Harold does one job entrée doesn't do — reading and validating inbound documents — and hands the result to entrée. Your system of record stays exactly where it is.
Can Harold handle catch-weight invoices?
Yes. Extracting multiple values from a single text line, including pack quantity and weight per case, is the specific capability Harold was built around, and you can apply formulas such as total weight equals case quantity multiplied by weight per case.
How does the data get into entrée?
Harold produces a validated file mapped to the fields entrée expects for import. NECS also offers an API service used by third-party applications to write into entrée data, which is available where you have development resource to connect it.
What happens when a supplier changes their invoice layout?
You retrain that supplier's template by highlighting the values on a new example. It takes minutes, and only that supplier is affected.
Do our suppliers have to do anything?
No. They send invoices exactly as they do now. Harold works from the document you already receive, which is the whole point — unlike EDI, nothing depends on the other party.
Keep entrée. Lose the data entry.
Start free, no credit card required. Train Harold on one supplier and see the output before you spend anything.
Try Harold free