ERP for food importers

Lucian connects customs, freight, warehouse, accounting, and sales, so you stop checking five places for one answer.

Traceability

Can you answer an FDA inspector in sixty seconds?

When a regulator asks where a specific lot went, most importers scramble through emails, spreadsheets, and QuickBooks reports for hours. Lucian shows the full chain of custody for any lot instantly: purchase order, container, customs and FDA clearance, warehouse receipt, and every customer invoice it touched, with the source documents attached at each step.

Continuity

Your business shouldn't depend on one person's memory

Most food distributors run on a custom spreadsheet or a homegrown system that only one person truly understands. When that person leaves or retires, the knowledge leaves with them. Lucian sits on top of the systems you already trust and documents how everything connects, so the business owns the process, not an individual.

Connect, don't replace

Keep your systems of record, connect them instead

Your accounting system and your customs broker already hold the truth. Replacing them creates risk; connecting them creates value. Lucian reads from both, links records by PO, container, and lot, and never writes back, so there's no chance of corrupting the books and no messy two-way sync to maintain.

Overview

Traceability for importers who already run QuickBooks

Lucian is not a second place to keep the books. It follows a case from purchase order through customs, warehouse receipt, transfer, and invoice, using the systems you already trust.

See the product
  • Lot-level chain of custody from manufacturer to invoice
  • FDA holds and clearance status without logging into the broker portal
  • On-hand, committed, and available inventory by warehouse
  • True FIFO cost layers instead of blended average cost
  • Every source document attached at the step it belongs to
  • No migration | Lucian reads QuickBooks and your broker, never writes
Is this for you?

Signs you've outgrown spreadsheets

  • Volume has doubled, but the process is the same handful of people holding it together
  • A recall or customer complaint required a frantic manual search to locate product
  • The next generation of ownership wants data on demand, not a report that takes a week
  • Container tracking, inventory, and accounting live in three places that never talk to each other
  • Reconciling those systems is a regular, recurring chore
See the product

Flip the switch

We'll do it for you in a couple seconds, or go ahead and try it now.

Spreadsheet: containers.xlsx
QuickBooks: Inventory Valuation Detail
Email: Fwd: Fwd: container docs.pdf
3 systems
Still cross-checking, ~40 min typically
PO 5512: Shipped
1,000 cases, ocean freight
In transit
Customs / FDA
Entry filed, flagged for inspection
Held
Warehouse receipt
Cleared, received into inventory
Cleared
Invoice 9081
640 cases billed, Kroger Midwest DC
Billed
Answered in one search
Benefits

What changes on day one

No 18-month implementation. Lucian sits next to the two systems you already run.

1 answer
Instead of checking five places: customs, freight, warehouse, accounting, and sales.
$1M+
The kind of valuation gap true FIFO tracking can surface against blended average cost.
Zero
New systems of record | Lucian reads QuickBooks and your broker, never writes.
~40 min
Typical hunt for one FDA hold today, down to a single lot search.
Capabilities

One layer for every step a case takes

Each one maps to a question your team already asks during a hold or a month-end close.

Lot tracing

Follow any case from manufacturer dispatch through customs, warehouse, transfer, and invoice.

How lot tracing works →

Customs & FDA

Cleared, held, in transit, or overdue. One status system, including FDA holds as a first-class state.

See clearance status →

FIFO cost layers

True per-warehouse landed cost, so inventory used as collateral is not a blended guess.

See cost layers →
Example scenario

What the lot record actually answers

Lucian is early, so this is a composite from importer working sessions rather than a named customer.

Illustrative · juice & beverage importer

Which bottles are on this hold, and which already shipped?

A juice entry gets flagged. Organic certs and COAs live in email; on-hand lives in QuickBooks; the broker portal has the hold. Lucian puts the lot, remaining cases, and billed customers on one record so ops answers before retail calls.

See the full scenarios
~40 min → 1 searchTime to answer “which lots are on hold?”

Bring one case number. We'll show you the whole chain.

See the product first. Then, if it fits, book a walkthrough with your own QuickBooks and broker data. Three fields, no phone number.