G2 Customer Reviews
What do you like best about Stok.ly – Inventory-Centric Cloud ERP?
“we have been a user for the last 4 years and we cannot think of life without it for our retail business. it makes listing to shopify and other marketplaces easy, keeps inventory accurate online and the POS is easy to use. accurate inventory across all sales channels is the big win for us.”
The Real Problem
The surface symptom looks like a missing module. The real problem runs deeper.
When a business switches its accountancy software — from Xledger to AccountsIQ, from a legacy system to Sage — it expects to carry its operational infrastructure with it. But accountancy platforms are built around the general ledger, not around the movement of physical stock. AccountsIQ has no stock system. That is not a gap that can be patched with a spreadsheet or a bolt-on app — it means the business is left with no connected inventory layer at all.
One operations manager described exactly this situation: “We’ve moved to Accounts IQ and so we’ve lost our stock system that used to sit alongside Xledger — so right now there’s no connected inventory system behind the business.”
This is the root cause: inventory functionality was never truly independent — it was a by-product of whichever accounting package happened to include it. The moment the accounting software changed, the stock system went with it. The business did not lose a feature; it lost visibility of its own stock.
The same pattern appears when a standalone stock tool is discontinued. As one buyer put it: “Stocky has been sunset in August so we’re going to lose our ability to transfer stock via like father warehouse and stuff like that.” When inventory control lives inside someone else’s product roadmap, it can be removed without warning.
There is a second, quieter failure mode: businesses that moved to a new accounting package and found the integrated stock workflows they had relied on — purchase order notifications, stock alerts, connected fulfilment — had simply disappeared. As one person recalled of a previous migration: “they were happy moving to Sage because the previous system their accounts package was within its system so they were getting notifications and all this kind of stuff from purchase orders everything was — there’s a lot of stuff that they’re really unhappy with at the moment.”
In every case, the root cause is the same: inventory management was subordinated to the accounting system rather than operating as a system of record in its own right. When the accounting software changes, stock control collapses with it.
Trust your stock. Transfer with confidence. Control orders. Fulfill every day like clockwork.
What It Costs
Operating without a connected inventory system is not a temporary inconvenience — it creates compounding operational risk from the moment the previous system goes dark.
- No real-time stock visibility. Without an inventory system tracking goods-in, goods-out, and inter-warehouse transfers, stock levels exist only as estimates. Buying decisions, fulfilment promises, and customer commitments are all made against numbers that may be wrong.
- No purchase order control. The notifications and alerts that purchasing teams relied on to confirm stock receipts and flag discrepancies — the kind one business described losing when it moved away from its previous integrated package — do not exist in a spreadsheet. Purchase orders go unmatched. Supplier discrepancies go unnoticed.
- Warehouse transfer capability lost entirely. For businesses running more than one location, the ability to move and record stock between sites depends on a system that understands warehouse structure. When that system is sunset or removed, inter-site transfers either stop or become untracked movements with no audit trail.
- Accounting records diverge from physical reality. Without a connected stock layer feeding into the general ledger, the accountancy software records financial transactions but has no mechanism to reconcile them against what is physically held. Stock valuations, cost of goods sold, and period-end counts become manual reconciliation exercises.
- The gap widens over time. Every day that passes without a connected inventory system is a day of unrecorded movements, unmatched orders, and unverifiable stock positions — all of which must eventually be reconstructed before the business can operate on accurate data again.
The commercial consequence is straightforward: a business that cannot see its stock cannot confidently sell it, buy more of it, or account for it. The accounting software switch that was supposed to be a finance-team decision has, in practice, disabled a core operational function.
Why current systems fail
The problem is not that inventory software is hard to find. The problem is that inventory has historically been bundled inside accounting platforms — and the moment a business changes its accounting software, the stock system goes with it.
AccountsIQ is a strong general ledger and financial reporting platform. It does not include a stock system. Xledger carried inventory functionality that AccountsIQ does not replicate. When a business migrates between these platforms, as happens routinely after acquisitions or group-level finance decisions, the inventory layer disappears. There is no handover, no equivalent module, and no migration path for stock data — because the new accounting system was never built to carry it.
The same pattern repeats with other tightly coupled platforms. Businesses that relied on Sage because purchase order notifications were built into their accounts package find that switching means losing those connected workflows entirely. Inventory visibility, PO alerts, warehouse transfer controls — all of it was living inside the accounting layer, not in a dedicated system built to own it.
Stocky, Shopify’s native inventory tool, followed the same logic: functionality bundled into a broader platform, then sunset in August, removing the ability to transfer stock between locations for businesses that had built warehouse operations around it.
In each case, the root cause is identical. Inventory has been treated as a feature of a financial or commerce platform, not as a function that deserves its own dedicated system. When the host platform changes or removes that feature, businesses are left without any connected inventory layer behind the business at all.
Order management and inventory ERP software for growing retail, wholesale and distribution businesses.
What Stok.ly is
Stok.ly is an order management-led, inventory-centric ERP. It functions as a dedicated inventory and order management platform that sits independently of whichever accounting software a business uses — connecting to AccountsIQ, Xero, Sage, or other general ledger tools without being owned by any of them.
Because Stok.ly is not an accounting platform and not a commerce plugin, it does not disappear when a business changes its finance software. The inventory layer — purchase orders, stock movements, warehouse controls, fulfilment workflows — lives in Stok.ly and remains intact regardless of what happens on the accounting side. Stok.ly passes the financial transactions it generates to whichever general ledger the business is using; it does not depend on that ledger to exist.
This is the structural difference between inventory as a feature of an accounting system and inventory as a system in its own right.
How Stok.ly solves it
When a business loses its stock system after an accounting migration, the immediate operational problem is that there is no connected inventory system behind the business. Stok.ly is installed as that independent layer — sitting between suppliers, warehouses, sales channels, and the accounting platform, rather than inside any of them.
Purchase orders are raised and tracked in Stok.ly. Incoming stock is receipted against those purchase orders, so the system always knows what has arrived, what is outstanding, and what is allocated to open sales orders. When stock moves between warehouse locations, those transfers are recorded in Stok.ly — the function that Stocky’s sunset removed is replaced by a dedicated inter-location transfer workflow that does not rely on a commerce platform to exist.
The connection to AccountsIQ, or any other general ledger, is handled through Stok.ly’s accounting integration. Financial transactions generated by stock movements and order fulfilment are pushed to the ledger. This means the accounts team continues to work in AccountsIQ exactly as planned, while the operations team has a live, connected inventory system that did not exist the day before Stok.ly was put in place.
The result is that the accounting migration and the inventory system become independent decisions. A business can change its general ledger without losing its stock controls, and can change its inventory platform without disrupting its accounts.
Stok.ly’s Capability Matrix
| Capability Name | What It Controls | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Accounting Integration & Mapping | Bi-directional data flow between Stok.ly and AccountsIQ, with tree-based nominal mapping, per-document-type sync control, and push of sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, and credit notes from Stok.ly into the connected accounting system | When an organisation moves to AccountsIQ and loses the stock system that previously sat alongside its accounts package, Stok.ly restores the connected inventory layer — purchase orders, sales invoices, and stock movements flow directly into AccountsIQ without manual re-keying between the two systems |
| Real-Time Multi-Location Inventory State Control | Inventory states — on hand, allocated, on order, in transfer, in manufacturing — at SKU level across all locations simultaneously | Without a connected inventory system, there is no single view of what stock exists, where it sits, or what is committed; this capability gives every team member a live, accurate picture so stock is never sold that is not available, and every location reflects reality rather than a last-known spreadsheet figure |
| Automated Min/Max Replenishment & Supply Trigger Engine | Stock thresholds and replenishment triggers at SKU and location level, automating purchasing and store replenishment based on min/max rules | When the system that handled minimum and maximum quantities, ordering forecasts, and automatic ordering is sunset, teams revert to manual weekly checks and judgment calls; this capability reinstates those automated triggers so stock does not fall below minimum levels and replenishment happens without human intervention on every line |
| Pre-Allocation Against Future Supply Engine | Pre-allocation of sales-order lines against purchase orders and manufacturing runs before stock physically arrives | Without a connected inventory system, there is no mechanism to ring-fence incoming stock for specific customer orders; this capability lets the business commit future supply to named orders while leaving current on-hand stock available across other channels, so stock is not sold to the wrong customer |
| Rules-Based Sales Order Processing Engine | The transition from an unprocessed order to a goods-out note and pick list, governed by logic-based fulfilment rules rather than manual decisions | When the previous integrated system handled purchase order notifications and fulfilment triggers automatically, losing it means staff must process every order by hand and chase information across disconnected systems; fulfilment rules restore that automatic flow so eligible orders move to picking without anyone having to intervene |
Some of the problems people tell us
“We’ve moved to Accounts IQ and so we’ve lost our stock system that used to sit alongside Xledger — so right now there’s no connected inventory system behind the business.”
“We’ve gone from one system to four systems and none of them talk to each other and it is complicated. We just need a better brain — a system that works a bit better and talks to everybody.”
A founder managing wholesale and retail channels
“stocky has been sunset in August so we’re going to lose our ability to transfer stock via like father warehouse and stuff like that”
“This kind of bad order will affect our customers’ first impression of us. It hurt our credibility with our customer.”
An e-commerce operations manager
“Their systems that we’re using don’t speak together, they don’t communicate, they don’t work together — it consistently breaks on their end.”
An operations director managing multiple fulfilment integrations
“Just before we were acquired, they changed their accountancy software package to AccountsIQ which doesn’t have a stock system.”
How the Approaches Compare
| Approach | What Actually Happens to Inventory Visibility | What Happens to Purchase Order Workflow | What Happens When the Accounting Platform Changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inventory module embedded inside an accounting platform (e.g. Xledger, Sage with native stock) | Inventory data exists only because the accounting package hosts it. If the accounting platform is replaced, the stock system goes with it — there is no independent inventory layer. | Purchase order notifications and stock receipts flow through the accounting system. Staff are trained on that workflow. When the platform changes, that workflow disappears. | The business is left with no connected inventory system. Stock levels, transfers between locations, and purchase order status must be managed manually or via spreadsheet until a replacement is found. |
| Accounting platform with no stock module (e.g. AccountsIQ in its current form) | No inventory visibility at all from day one of the migration. The gap is immediate and operational, not theoretical. | Purchase orders exist in the accounting system as financial documents only — no goods-receipt matching, no stock update on delivery, no alerting against expected inbound stock. | Not applicable — there is no stock system to lose. The problem is that one was never provided. |
| A deprecated inventory add-on (e.g. Stocky, sunset August 2024) | Inventory and warehouse transfer capability is lost on the deprecation date. Any process built around inter-warehouse stock movement stops working. | Whatever purchase order integration existed through the add-on is also lost. The business must find a replacement before the cutoff date or absorb the operational gap. | The accounting platform survives unchanged, but the inventory layer it depended on is gone. The business faces the same disconnected state as an accounting-platform migration. |
| Stok.ly — order management-led, inventory-centric ERP | Inventory sits in Stok.ly independently of whichever accounting platform the business uses. A change of accounting software does not remove or reset stock data. | Purchase orders are raised, tracked, and matched against goods receipts inside Stok.ly. Stock levels update on receipt. The accounting platform receives the financial posting — it does not own the operational workflow. | Stok.ly connects to the new accounting platform via its integration layer. The inventory system, stock history, warehouse transfer logic, and purchase order workflow remain intact and operational throughout the switch. |
Who this is for
- Stok.ly is for product businesses that have moved to AccountsIQ — or any modern cloud accounting platform — and discovered, after the switch, that they no longer have a connected inventory system behind the business. If your previous stock functionality lived inside your old accounts package and that link has now been broken, Stok.ly is built for exactly this situation.
- Wholesalers, distributors, and multi-site retailers running AccountsIQ as their accounting layer and needing a standalone inventory and order management system to sit alongside it.
- Businesses that have recently been acquired or merged and whose new parent company has changed the accounting platform, removing the stock module they relied on.
- Operations teams currently managing stock in spreadsheets, email chains, or disconnected workarounds while they search for a permanent replacement.
- Warehouse and operations managers who need purchase order control, stock transfer between locations, and real-time inventory visibility — capabilities that AccountsIQ does not provide.
- Businesses whose previous inventory tool (such as Stocky) has been sunset and who need to replace stock transfer and fulfilment workflows before the gap causes operational damage.
Frequently Asked Questions
We have moved to AccountsIQ and no longer have a stock system — what does Stok.ly replace?
Can Stok.ly connect directly to AccountsIQ so our accounts and stock stay in sync?
Stocky has been sunset and we are losing our ability to transfer stock between warehouses — can Stok.ly handle that?
We were acquired and the new parent company changed our accounting software, removing our stock system — how quickly can we get Stok.ly running?
Is Stok.ly a full ERP, or just an inventory add-on?
We are currently tracking stock in spreadsheets while we search for a replacement — is that a problem for migrating to Stok.ly?
Our previous system sent automatic notifications from purchase orders through to the accounts team — will we lose that with a separate inventory system?
Does Stok.ly work for businesses with multiple warehouses or storage locations?
Contact Information
All our sales, support and development team are located in Hereford and Cheltenham in the U.K. Please submit the contact form and we will contact you within the same business day.