inFlow Inventory launches lot number and expiry date tracking

Small manufacturers and distributors in food, beverage, pharmaceutical and medical device industries can now trace any batch from receipt to customer, at a fraction of the cost of an enterprise ERP.

TORONTO, Aug. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- inFlow Inventory has launched lot number and expiry date tracking, giving small and midsize manufacturers and distributors full batch-level traceability across purchasing, production, sales and shipping.

This feature release follows two years of development and a year of testing with food manufacturers, pharmaceutical distributors and medical device companies. inFlow now offers lot number tracking — a traditionally high-end or enterprise-grade feature — to small businesses that needed it but may not have been able to afford it.

Many small food producers still track lot numbers manually on spreadsheets. They take note of the lots as they're received and cross-reference them by hand if a recall occurs. This manual process is time consuming and doesn't scale quickly.

The alternative has been an enterprise resource planning system (ERP), which typically assumes a paid implementation measured in months and a budget in the tens of thousands of dollars. When faced with high ERP costs, most small manufacturers and distributors stick to their existing spreadsheets or paper systems.

"Traceability shouldn't be a luxury feature," said Louis Leung, co-founder and CEO at inFlow Inventory. "The businesses we built this for are not trying to be sophisticated. They are trying to answer one question fast when something goes wrong. For a long time, the only tools that could answer it were priced for companies a hundred times their size."

What it does

Traces a batch from receipt to customer. Every lot carries a full movement history: when it arrived, what it was used to build, where it was stored and who bought it. A recall becomes a report to run rather than an investigation to launch.

Prevents expiring stock from becoming a write-off. Set a shelf life once, and inFlow calculates expiry dates for every incoming batch. A Lot Expiry report sorts stock by Expired, Near expiry, or Past sell-by date, surfacing at-risk inventory while there is still time to sell it.

Ships the oldest stock first, automatically. inFlow tells staff which batch to pick, prioritizing by sell-by date, then expiry date, then manufacture date. First-expired-first-out is built into the software.

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