Markets change. Prices shift. Customer needs evolve. Modern lumber and building material software helps you handle it all with confidence.
Whether you're managing special orders, dealing with rising costs, or serving customers across multiple locations, the right system makes your job easier as you head into 2026.
Like many building materials businesses, your system might have been perfect when you first installed it, but now it struggles to keep up.
If you're spending more time working around its limitations than growing your business, it may be time to evaluate what newer lumber dealer software can offer.
6 signs your ERP won't carry you through 2026
If any of these feel familiar, your system is likely slowing your business down - and could limit your growth in 2026:
1. You rely on spreadsheets, paper, or manual work to get things done.2. Finance sits in a separate system, so margins and costs aren’t visible in real time.
3. Changes to your system or workflow improvements need developer involvement
4. Your system feels generic rather than designed for LBM
5. Integrating ecommerce, mobile, manufacturing, or specialist tools is difficult
6. Your team wastes time finding information or re-keying data
If this is you, you’re facing the same challenge Christmas Lumber described:
“Our industry has been slow to adopt technology, with so many companies still operating as we did – heavily reliant on paper processes across accounting, sales, and manufacturing. We knew that continuing with our outdated, clunky ERP system would keep us at a significant disadvantage.”
Similarly, long-standing LBM suppliers are reaching the same conclusion. Coomers Timber & Building Supplies also noted,
“It became obvious that our previous provider hadn’t developed their product as far as GenetiQ and had a long way to go to catch up.”
These moments often spark the shift toward next-generation ERP.
What a 2026-ready building materials ERP should deliver
Below is a streamlined view of what you should expect from ERP designed for the LBM industry.
1. Inventory management that keeps your yards moving
A modern ERP gives accurate inventory visibility across all branches, supports dimensional lumber tracking, handles special orders smoothly, and drives smarter reordering. It should also support efficient branch transfers so each yard meets local demand without carrying unnecessary stock.
“Before, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if we had 12ft of mahogany in stock… Now I can tell you what lengths we have it in and what widths across both premises.”
- Michael Dowling, Strahan Timber
Reducing uncertainty leads to fewer calls to the yard, fewer missed items, and better customer response times.
2. Pricing and margin control you can trust
As material costs shift, your ERP should help you roll out price updates quickly, apply customer-specific pricing, and maintain healthy margins. Staff should see live cost and price information at the point of sale.
“We can quickly adjust product prices or job volumes with just a few clicks… This responsiveness allows us to manage product shortages or price increases efficiently.”
- Tim Payne, South Coast Building Supplies
“We completed a full pricing reboot for several thousand products in just two weeks, a task that would have taken three months before.”
- Louis Jenkins, South Coast Building Supplies
This level of efficiency keeps your business competitive when market volatility increases.
3. A more productive team, wherever they work
Your system should support flexible working, provide dashboards tailored to each role, and give sales and service teams live access to stock, orders, and deliveries. Integrated point of sale software also helps counter staff work faster with everything they need in one view.
Coomers highlighted the impact this will have on daily operations:
“Accessing what we need will be so much faster than before. The ability to customise views so staff don't see irrelevant clutter is extremely important.”
- Charlie Stuart, Coomers Timber & Building Supplies
The result is smoother interactions at the counter, quicker answers, and a better overall experience for the people you serve every day.
4. Decisions backed by accurate, real-time data
Your ERP should give you clear, reliable visibility across your entire business, with real-time dashboards, accurate reporting, and alerts that highlight issues before they escalate.
The goal is simple: to help you make confident decisions based on what’s actually happening, not on guesswork or outdated information.
An ERP designed for today’s LBM operations makes it much easier to get the data you need without hunting through the system. With real-time dashboards, alerts, and reporting built in, you can quickly see what’s happening across sales, stock, pricing, deliveries, and finance.
AI now strengthens this by speeding up the path from data to action. It can highlight shifts in sales patterns, customer behaviour, or products that may need attention, and help interpret unclear customer requests so your team has the right details ready to review.
For Christmas Lumber, the move to a modern, integrated system is a turning point:
“The business flow through these integrated systems will eliminate our reliance on paper and provide remarkable analytics capabilities. We’ll gain visibility into cost applications, identify optimization opportunities, and enhance our business processes in ways our current system simply cannot support.”
- Michelle Lowe, Christmas Lumber
“We have greatly enhanced our understanding of what’s selling and what’s not… This information is so easy to find and helps us make more informed decisions.”
- Adam Baker, Herne Bay Plumbing
Real-time data supported by practical AI helps you spot opportunities earlier, respond faster, and run the business with greater clarity.
Lumber and building material software in practice
Here’s what our customers are seeing after modernising their lumber and building materials software:
- Up to 30% sales uplift driven by smarter, data-led marketing campaigns.
- Faster, more consistent pricing across branches, protecting margins and reducing errors.
- More than 100 hours a month saved in finance through automated workflows.
- 97% invoice accuracy achieved with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)- powered processing.
- Over 100 hours saved in purchase ledgers using EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) to eliminate manual entry.
- Around 45 hours saved each month through integrated banking and automatic reconciliation.
- 25% fewer delivery runs and tighter inventory control thanks to smarter, sales-based replenishment.
These results show what’s possible when your software fits your industry and gives you the tools to work smarter in real time.
Choosing the right technology partner
The right partner should offer more than software. They should bring industry knowledge, ongoing innovation, and support that genuinely helps your team succeed.
Look for a partner who:
- Invests consistently in modern, cloud-native technology
- Builds features based on direct LBM feedback
- Understands the realities of LBM distribution, manufacturing, and multi-branch operations
- Provides local, US-based support so your team has direct access to people who know your industry and can help you get the most from the software
- Supports phased implementations with strong, people-first hypercare when you go live
- Scales easily as you add new branches, sites, or acquisitions
Coomers described the value of industry alignment:
“What gives you trust in a long-term partnership is how industry partners and other peers in the industry talk about it… that sense of community speaks volumes.”
Christmas Lumber echoed the importance of future scalability:
“GenetiQ is completely scalable, so it's not just for big companies, it's also perfect for family-run businesses who want the ability to react and adapt to business changes quickly.”Choosing a partner with industry expertise and a scalable, modern platform ensures your ERP continues to evolve with your business.
How to know if it’s time to upgrade
Ask yourself:
- Are manual or paper processes holding us back?
- Are pricing updates, reporting, or stocktakes taking too long?
- Are integrations with manufacturing, ecommerce, or mobile tools too difficult?
- Are we using multiple disconnected systems?
- Does our ERP truly support the way we want to operate our LBM business today?
If these resonate with you, your lumber and building material software may not be ready for where your business is heading.
Be the business you want to be!
See how GenetiQ supports stronger operations today and gives you room to grow into what’s next.