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FEFO pick logic, lot-level traceability, and expiration alerts used to be Enterprise-only. As of this week they're standard on every plan.
For three years, lot tracking and expiration management have sat behind the Enterprise tier in Nautilus. As of this week they don't. Every Pro plan gets the same lot-level traceability, FEFO pick logic, and expiration alerts that our largest customers have been using.
We're announcing it here because the change is meaningful for a few industries (food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, agriculture) and because the reasoning matters.
Why we moved it
We had a working theory when we built Nautilus that lot tracking was an Enterprise feature. It's bookkeeping-heavy and carries real regulatory exposure. It also changes how receiving works. Enterprise customers, we figured, would have the operations maturity to set it up. Pro customers would not, and exposing it to them would make the product feel heavier than it needed to.
That theory was wrong in one specific direction. The customers who needed lot tracking most urgently were not always the biggest. A six-person specialty food distributor handling 1,200 SKUs has the same FDA traceability requirements as a thousand-person operation. Putting their use case behind a sales call was bad for them and bad for us.
About half of our Pro customers in food and beverage had been asking us for this for two years. The other half had been quietly working around it (logging lots in spreadsheets, doing expiration checks by hand). Neither was a good outcome.
What lot tracking actually does
At the receiving step, instead of recording "we received 200 units of SKU X," operators record "we received 200 units of SKU X in lot 24-A19 with expiration date Nov 4, 2026." The lot identifier travels with every subsequent operation: putaway, count, pick, ship. If a lot is later recalled, the system can identify every customer order that contained units from that lot in about a second.
FEFO (first-expired-first-out) is the pick logic that pairs with it. When there are multiple lots of the same SKU available, the pick recommender chooses the one with the earliest expiration. The operator doesn't have to think about it. The system just routes them to the right bin.
Expiration alerts run on a schedule we picked based on customer use: 30 days out, 14 days out, 7 days out. Operations leads get a digest. The thresholds are configurable per category, because a 14-day window means something very different for fresh produce than it does for pharmaceutical reagents.
What's new and what isn't
The underlying engine has been in production for three years. We're not turning on something new; we're turning down the access gate. The Enterprise tier still has features that build on lot tracking (custom regulatory reports, the audit trail export, lot-level shrink analysis), and those stay where they were.
What's free now: lots on receipt, FEFO picking, expiration alerts, lot-level traceability reports, recall lookup.
Turning it on
For Pro customers in lot-relevant industries (food and beverage, pharma, cosmetics, agriculture, chemicals) lot tracking will be enabled by default starting May 28. For other Pro customers it's behind a setting in the warehouse configuration, off by default, since adding the lot field to the receiving workflow changes how operators interact with the app and we don't want to make that choice for you.
The help center has setup guides for each industry. The 30-minute migration call we used to offer Enterprise customers is now available on Pro as well.
Not for everyone
This isn't free in the operational sense. Lot tracking adds a field at the receiving step, and operators have to actually enter the right lot. If your products don't have lot numbers printed by your suppliers, you have to invent your own conventions. There's a setup cost.
For some product types the setup cost is too high relative to the benefit. If your inventory turns weekly, expiration is implicit. If your suppliers don't print lot numbers, you're either taking on the burden of generating them at receipt (workable, but a real workflow change) or skipping the feature.
We're making it available because the people who need it really need it. We're not pushing it on customers who don't.