How we centralised Asterley Bros' ordering system and removed three hours of daily admin

Three hours per day. That is what it cost us, in aggregate, to run a manual ordering process across a seven-person team at Asterley Bros. One person collating. Two people copying. One person creating invoices by hand at the end of the week. The numbers are not dramatic, but compounded across fifty working weeks a year, they represent a significant portion of a small team's capacity.

This is a build log. It covers the problem we had, the stack we put together, and what the day-to-day looks like now. I am writing it as the person who built the system, not as someone selling a platform. The tools involved are Shopify, Notion, Xero, and Telegram. Nothing proprietary.

What the ordering chaos actually looked like

Asterley Bros makes premium vermouth and aperitivo in South London. We sell through three distinct channels: direct-to-consumer via our Shopify storefront, direct to trade accounts (bars, bartenders, individual buyers) through WhatsApp, texts, Instagram DMs, and email, and via purchase orders from distributors and wholesalers.

Each channel operated in isolation. There was no shared inbox, no shared view. Every morning, one member of the admin team would open every platform, read through messages and notifications, and manually transfer order details into a Google Sheet. That was the source of truth. Or rather, it was the closest thing we had to one.

The production team would then transcribe from the Sheet onto paper, print labels, carry them to the warehouse, and begin assembling dispatches. The risk of transcription error was present at every handoff. At the end of the week, I would open the Sheet, cross-reference it against what had shipped, and manually create invoices in Xero one by one.

For a seven-person team with real stakes and thin margins, this was an unacceptable drag on capacity. The problem was not that individuals were working inefficiently. The problem was that the system forced them to work in a way that was structurally broken.

The build: what we changed and how the stack connects

The core fix was a trade portal built on Shopify. All direct trade accounts now place orders there rather than by message. The portal handles authentication, product catalogue, and pricing tiers. It is not a complex build, but it required us to migrate relationships, communicate the change clearly to accounts, and maintain that channel over time.

When an order is placed, two things happen immediately. The buyer receives an automated email confirmation. The production team receives both an email and a Telegram notification. No one has to check a separate inbox to know an order came in.

All order streams, including direct consumer Shopify orders, trade portal orders, purchase orders from distributors, and sample requests, now feed into a single Notion board. The columns are: Order Received, In Process, Completed, Dispatched, Archive. Every member of the team has full visibility. I can check the board from a phone between batches in the workshop and see the state of every live order.

The Xero integration is the piece I am most satisfied with. A draft invoice is auto-created every time an order is placed. The data is already populated: line items, quantities, customer details. All I do is review, approve, and send. The manual invoicing run that previously occupied my Friday afternoon no longer exists.

Before and after: a direct comparison

What the data says about where craft producers are going

I want to be careful here about overstating what this build represents. It is not a transformation in any grand sense. It is a well-connected set of tools doing what they were designed to do, applied to a specific operational problem in a specific South London workshop.

But the operational problem is not unique to us. A 2026 survey by InfinitySky covering breweries, wineries, and distilleries found that manual order management and fragmented communication tools were among the most commonly cited operational pain points for small producers. The pattern we had at Asterley Bros, orders scattered across messaging platforms and collated manually each morning, is widespread in the craft sector.

The drinks category has particular pressures. Premium vermouth and aperitivo have seen sustained growth in the UK on-trade over the past several years, as documented by The Drinks Business. That growth brings more accounts, more orders, and more complexity. Small producers who cannot scale their operational processes alongside their commercial growth run the risk of turning good sales momentum into operational debt.

What this build actually required

The stack itself is not technically exotic. Shopify, Notion, Xero, and Telegram are all tools with well-documented APIs and existing integration pathways. The investment was mostly time, specifically time spent mapping the workflow carefully before touching any of the tools.

We spent longer than I expected on the trade portal migration. Getting established accounts to change the way they place orders required clear communication and a degree of hand-holding in the first few weeks. The technology was ready before the people were, and that is almost always the case.

The Notion board structure also required deliberate design. The column logic, Order Received, In Process, Completed, Dispatched, Archive, needs to match the actual physical workflow in the warehouse. If it does not, the board becomes noise rather than signal. We revised the column structure twice before it felt accurate.

I have come to think that the build itself is the easier half of this kind of project. The harder half is change management within a small team that has built habits around the old process. That is worth naming plainly, because most build logs skip it.

FAQ

What tools does Asterley Bros use to manage trade orders?

Direct accounts order through a trade portal built on Shopify. Each order triggers an email confirmation to the buyer and a Telegram notification to the production team, and populates a Notion board with columns for Order Received, In Process, Completed, Dispatched, and Archive.

How does the Xero invoice automation work?

Every time an order is placed through any channel, a draft invoice is automatically created in Xero with all line items and customer details already populated. The founder reviews, approves, and sends. No manual data entry is required to generate the invoice.

Can a small drinks brand afford to build this kind of system?

The stack relies on tools many small producers already pay for: Shopify, Notion, Xero, and a Telegram bot. The automation layer that connects them does not require bespoke software development. The main investment is time spent mapping the workflow correctly before building.

What was the biggest operational problem before the build?

Orders were arriving across WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, email, and Shopify with no single point of truth. One admin team member collated everything manually into Google Sheets each morning, creating a bottleneck before the production day had even started.

How long did the manual process take each day?

Across the full team, the combined time spent on order collation, label printing, data copying, and manual invoicing was approximately three hours per day. That time has been removed from the equation entirely.