What if your finance team could reclaim dozens of hours every month? What if product discovery happened before you even clicked search? What if your presentations built themselves from templates your best rep designed once?
commonsku is in the middle of its most aggressive development cycle ever, and Charlie Moscoe, VP of Product, joins Bobby to unpack what's shipping now, what's coming next, and why these changes matter more than any update the platform has ever released.
This isn't about incremental improvement. This is about reimagining the entire distributor workflow—from how you handle payments to how AI learns what your clients actually buy.
Charlie reveals commonsku's ambitious infrastructure project: a complete overhaul of the finance system. This includes rebuilt integrations for QuickBooks, Xero, and other accounting platforms, plus an entirely new interface for invoices, bills, credit memos, and vendor credits.
Configure how you handle payment processing globally or project-by-project—you decide whether to absorb the cost or pass it through to clients.
Clients can also choose to pay by credit card or by ACH for lower costs on both sides. You control the terms, they choose the method.
This will change everything. When bills arrive from Connected+ suppliers through PromoStandards, commonsku will automatically pulls them in and matches them against purchase orders.
For orders where everything aligns perfectly? One button push completes the reconciliation.
Charlie's team discovered bill reconciliation ranks among the biggest time sinks on the platform. Large distributors have teams spending human-months on this work annually. The automation tackles simple cases first—perfect matches—so your finance team can focus on discrepancies that actually need human judgment.
The updated presentations feature spent over a year in beta—unusually long for commonsku. The reason? The initial version delivered beautiful, interactive presentations using shop layouts, but required extensive setup work for every single presentation.
commonsku built a templating system that rolled out first for shops, then presentations. Now your most design-forward team members create presentation templates once, and everyone deploys them across all projects.
Forty new distributors just joined the beta with this templating capability, and it's rapidly becoming the preferred method for building commonsku presentations. The flexibility lets you bring brand storytelling and visual polish to client proposals without rebuilding from scratch every time.
Want early access? Join the beta program through the skummunity Forum and help shape
features before they launch platform-wide.
AI Recommendations and Connected+ Search launched to all commonsku users, operating on two intelligent levels.
When you search products from Connected+ suppliers, the AI considers your client's historical buying patterns. Focus heavily on sustainability? Consistently order from specific suppliers? Search results reflect those preferences automatically.
This isn't keyword matching—it's pattern recognition based on what your business actually sells.
The system analyzes:
Instead of generic suggestions, you see products the client has actually bought before or options that fit their documented preferences.
Beta testing showed impressive contextual awareness: a beach party for an insurance company prompted recommendations for sunscreens and phone protectors. The AI understood both the event type and the industry to make relevant suggestions.
Both features work exclusively with Connected+ suppliers (now 13 and growing), ensuring seamless workflow from discovery through ordering across Presentations, Estimates, and Sales Orders.
Your Data Stays Secure:
commonsku maintains SOC 2 accreditation. All AI work happens within secure parameters, and your distributor data never trains third-party machine learning systems.
Experience AI-powered search today. Log into commonsku and try Connected+ Search on your next project to see personalized recommendations in action.
Distributor businesses are growing. Individual projects are expanding. Data volumes are multiplying. Some distributors now run reports referencing millions of line items, and certain platform areas started taking twice as long to load as commonsku's internal standards allow.
Migration to servers that automatically spin up additional capacity when system load increases. No more slowdowns during peak usage.
Specific optimization on application areas where large orders or years of platform history create bottlenecks.
Charlie notes the development team doubled over the past year—from 10 to over 20 engineers. This scale allows simultaneous work on performance optimization and new feature development. Speed and innovation happen in parallel, not in sequence.
An evolution of the existing dashboard tile with dramatically enhanced capabilities:
What It Does:
Why It Matters—The Actions Column:
This transforms dormant historical data into actionable growth intelligence for sales reps.
Advanced tier customer? The Potential Repeat Order Report launches in October. Check the skummunity Forum for the announcement and early access details.
E-Commerce Integration
Connect any third-party e-commerce site to commonsku with new endpoints designed for flexibility and scalability.
Custom Product & Inventory Management
Built for warehouse management systems (WMS) as distributors scale into fulfillment operations or 3PL partnerships.
This feature deserves special attention. Built in partnership with Avalara and tested up to 100,000 orders, it handles shipping address-based taxes for massive drop-ship programs.
Use Case:
Tax nexus in multiple states + one client project shipping to 100,000 locations = commonsku manages that complexity automatically.
Bonus: While Enterprise teams built it for large distributors, it launches as an Advanced-level feature, helping smaller distributors with nexus in five or ten states manage multi-state billing scenarios.
Running complex drop-ship programs? Learn how Enterprise features can support your scaling operations and eliminate manual tax calculations.
Charlie outlined commonsku's AI philosophy across four development stages:
Targeted workflow tools like Connected+ AI search. Provides data access and human-actionable insights.
AI takes non-destructive actions automatically. Background processes creating tasks for potential reorders or flagging cross-sell opportunities reps might miss.
AI catches issues before they escalate. Example: orders where missing proof approval will force unnecessary rush fees, prompting action before problems occur.
AI assumes routine operational roles to free human capacity. Bookkeeping bots, order management bots—handling repetitive tasks so your team focuses on complex problems and growth opportunities.
Charlie's Emphasis: Stage 4 remains optional by design. The goal is augmentation, not replacement.
Resources → commonsku University → Got an Idea
Product, customer success, development, and design teams review every submission during regular meetings. Every idea gets evaluated on the record.
Visit the skummunity Forum → Feature Releases Announcement page. Product managers post when features need testing. Raise your hand, get early access, provide feedback on rough edges.
Have a feature idea? Submit it today and get it in front of the product team. Every submission gets reviewed.
Episode 350 captures commonsku at an inflection point. The finance rebuild, AI integration, performance optimization, and tier-specific enhancements represent the most comprehensive platform evolution since the company launched.
Automation Targets Time Sinks First
Bill matching, repeat order identification, product discovery—development analyzed where distributors lose hours and built tools to reclaim that time.
AI Learns From Actual Behavior
Instead of generic algorithms, commonsku's AI personalizes based on real purchase history, real project details, real client preferences.
Scale Enables Simultaneous Progress
Doubling the development team means performance improvements and new features happen in parallel, not in sequence.
This episode provides the clearest picture yet of where commonsku is heading and why these changes compound on each other:
Each piece strengthens the others.
Charlie's parting thought about the development team says everything: "Really excited to have a bunch of exciting new announcements early in the new year."
Translation: this is just the beginning.
Ready to see these features in action? Schedule a demo or explore commonsku pricing tiers to find the right fit for your distribution business.
[00:01:22] Recently shipped features: credit card fee pass-through and ACH payments
[00:02:28] Updated presentations beta feedback and templating system
[00:04:06] How the beta process works with customers
[00:05:37] Finance updates: rebuilt accounting integrations and automatic bill matching
[00:08:22] Advanced tier: Potential Repeat Order Report coming in October
[00:09:25] Enterprise: API endpoints for e-commerce and WMS integration
[00:10:21] Split-ship taxes feature with Avalara (tested to 100,000 orders)
[00:11:23] AI Connected+ product search and recommendations explained
[00:14:30] The four-stage AI roadmap: insight, action, prevention, automation
[00:17:32] Platform performance and reliability: dynamic scaling architecture
[00:18:10] How to submit ideas and join beta programs