iRely and the expensive art of losing track

At Pigott Oil, someone found an item that should not have been there. The fuel and convenience-retail business had put item-level inventory into use, and an unauthorized vendor product became visible. Staff sent it back. In the company’s published account, this was a goal achieved after a long wait. The incident was small enough to fit on a shelf. Its implications occupied the whole business.

A business can know its total sales and still struggle to know what it has sold. It can have an accounting system, an inventory system and a delivery system, each quite respectable, and employ people whose unofficial job is persuading those systems to agree. The spreadsheet becomes a diplomatic service. iRely sells software for this territory, where physical goods acquire financial consequences as they move.

The item that should not have been there

Pigott’s case study describes limited inventory visibility, manual price and margin management, disconnected financial systems and cumbersome fuel-delivery workflows. Its chosen iRely functions include pricebook and promotions, inventory, lottery management, financials, tank management and motor fuel tax. Read that list slowly. A convenience retailer is also a purchaser, stockkeeper, fuel operator and taxpayer. A till sees only one part of the enterprise.

“We even caught an unauthorized vendor item”Laura Hough, CPA, CFO of Pigott Oil, in iRely’s customer case study

The appealing detail is the return to the vendor. Better information led to a specific action. That is a more useful standard for software than the beauty of its dashboard: can someone detect the discrepancy, locate its cause and do something about it? Pigott’s account puts a wonderfully ordinary item at the center of a large systems purchase.

Berry Oil supplies a second example. Its published customer story describes bringing retail, transport, inventory and accounting together, with improved traceability and less duplicate entry across departments. The stated results include a faster month-end close and reduced tax-filing work. These are customer experiences published by the vendor, rather than promises of a universal result. Their common thread is quite precise: less labor devoted to reconstructing what already happened. Berry’s account makes that connection explicit.

One transaction, several consequences

iRely develops enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, alongside commodity trading and risk management software, or CTRM. ERP organizes the operating business and its accounts. CTRM handles the trading business: contracts, derivatives, positions, exposure and profit and loss. iRely’s argument is that companies buying, moving, processing and selling commodities need these records connected.

Consider a simplified commodity purchase. The buyer agrees a quantity and price. Someone arranges delivery. Another person checks quality. Stock becomes available, gets processed or is sold, and eventually appears in financial reports. Meanwhile, a hedge may change the business’s exposure to price movements. This illustration explains why a system that remembers only the invoice has an incomplete memory.

The iRely CTRM product covers physical and financial trades, logistics, inventory, quality, contracts and risk reporting. Its market includes traders and processors of coffee, cocoa, cotton, tea, sugar and other commodities. The company reports more than 500 customers in over 25 countries. This is business software for organizations whose stock has a location, a quality and a market price - sometimes changing at inconveniently different speeds.

The three-year wager

The company history records a decisive sequence. iRely was established in 2008, acquired Summit Software in 2010 and Comtech Solutions in 2011, then began consolidating its software onto one platform in 2013. The rewrite finished in 2016. Customer conversions began in 2017. A convenience-store module followed in 2018.

My reading of that sequence is that iRely chose to make its acquired expertise share a technical home. Grain and petroleum knowledge can arrive through acquisitions; making the resulting products work as one system requires another kind of effort. That history gives substance to the present pitch about integration.

iRely also describes itself as privately owned and self-funded, with a long-term ownership plan. For a buyer, the relevant question is how long the relationship will last after installation. The ownership argument belongs beside the product argument: the customer is choosing a supplier that will maintain software, support workflows and deliver upgrades over time.

The bushel, the batch and the bill

The distinctive features are easiest to see below the level of the platform slogan. iRely’s grain origination software offers a live daily position report, tracks hedging activity and manages contract details such as delivery form, price basis and freight basis. A grain elevator needs those distinctions because a promise to deliver grain is different from grain already sitting in storage.

In feed management, recipes can include inventory items, customer grain-bank balances and mixing charges. Completing a work order can lead to an invoice and adjustments to inventory and grain bank. The recipe reaches beyond production. It affects what the business owes a customer, what remains available and what should be billed.

Manufacturers get another set of particulars: recipes expressed in percentages, substitute materials with substitution ratios, blending strategies that consider quality, cost and expiration, and lot traceability from raw materials to finished goods. The commodity management offering also supports tracing finished products back to their input lots. The important unit here is the batch, with its own history, rather than an undifferentiated number on an inventory screen.

A terminal joins the conversation

On June 4, 2026, iRely announced Terminal Management inside its i21 ERP platform. The module connects pipeline terminal operations with accounting and trading risk. The launch announcement describes Transport4 connectivity, batch tracking, bill-of-lading imports from DTN, invoice uploads back to DTN and motor fuel tax calculation and reporting.

Here the enemy is repeated entry. A bill of lading already records a movement; typing it again introduces another opportunity to get that movement wrong. The new module also applies a pricing hierarchy and supports multiple terminals and tenancy arrangements. TopTech support and further DTN reporting and rack-pricing capabilities were listed on the 2026-2027 roadmap. Buyers should distinguish those plans from the functions announced at launch.

Rehearse the awkward day

Buying a system this connected involves more than selecting screens. iRely’s business includes enterprise software and SaaS deployments, implementation, support and managed cloud hosting. Its Business Process Review maps the customer’s work, identifies configuration and workflow changes, and establishes implementation scope and costing. The practical lesson is to price the business process, including the work needed to make it run, rather than treating the software purchase as the whole project. iRely described this approach in its 2020 expansion announcement.

Its services process also includes parallel testing on up to two weeks of daily transactions before implementation. The User Acceptance Program uses customer-specific process flows and data in a test environment, with automated checks for critical processes and custom features. The reader can copy the principle: make the proposed system handle the complicated day, then keep those tests for the next upgrade. A tidy demonstration is a poor substitute for a working close.

The published careers material places accountability, customer responsibility, teamwork, metrics and return on investment near the center of the company’s culture. It advertises hybrid or remote work as well. These are the employer’s stated commitments, but the emphasis fits the product: people implementing software that runs somebody else’s business have to care about details long after the sale.

iRely operates in a competitive market. ION Aspect and Agiboo Agiblocks also address commodity trading and risk management. Integration alone does not settle the choice. iRely’s particular proposition brings that trading work alongside petroleum, grain, feed, manufacturing and convenience-retail operations.

The fit is strongest when those activities depend on one another. For a simpler business, the breadth may demand more implementation effort than the work warrants; that is an editorial inference, and a reason to map requirements first. Reliable data, agreed process ownership and tested interfaces still matter. A useful purchasing exercise is to follow one awkward transaction from receipt to settlement and ask where a person must intervene. The unauthorized item at Pigott offers a suitably modest ambition: see what happened early enough to act.