B2B Magento Development for HBS Group — A Store Wired Into the ERP

HBS Group has supplied schools since 1973 and today serves thousands of schools, academy trusts and businesses across the UK. Almost every one of them buys on its own terms: negotiated prices, agreed delivery rules and a purchasing process that often runs through a procurement portal or a finance system rather than a shopping basket.

Their Access Dimensions ERP is the source of truth for products, prices, accounts and orders. The website could not be a separate shop that someone re-keys orders from. It had to behave as a live front end to the ERP, and it had to do that while:

We built the store on Magento Open Source and extended it with a suite of purpose-built modules, rather than bending third-party extensions into shapes they were never designed for. This is the approach behind all of our Magento B2B development work: the platform handles the storefront, and the parts that make the business different are written to fit the business.

ERP integration. A scheduled integration layer keeps products, accounts, addresses, prices and stock in sync with Access Dimensions, and pushes every order back the moment it is placed. Stock is checked live by account code, and delivery dates are looked up at checkout, so what the buyer sees is what the warehouse knows.

Account-level pricing. Each ERP account maps to its own Magento customer group, so a buyer sees their contracted prices everywhere, with no price list to download and no quote to request. New customers fall into standard price bands until their own terms are set up.

Procurement integration. cXML and OCI punchout let schools browse and order from inside their procurement portals. SIMS FMS integration lets them raise orders directly from their finance system, with purchase-order delivery dates carried through to the ERP. Trusts get approval routing, multi-user accounts, and a checkout lock for customers who may only order against an approved purchase order.

Finance. A Sage Intacct connector handles order and status flow in both directions, so finance teams on either side are looking at the same record.

Logo and product personalisation. Schools upload and store their logo, save personalisation presets, and design exercise books and print items online. Personalisation costs are priced correctly alongside account discounts, and each personalised line arrives in the ERP labelled for the print room.

Customer experience. A fast order form for buyers who know what they want, quick view, cross-sells, advanced product filters, Page Builder landing pages, free-gift promotions and delivery-date selection at checkout.

One store now serves retail-style browsing and strict B2B procurement from the same catalogue. Pricing, stock and orders flow automatically between the website and the ERP, and nobody re-keys anything.

For schools and trusts, there are three ways to order and all of them end in the same place: through their own procurement portal via punchout, from their finance system, or straight from the site with their contracted prices applied. Trusts keep control of spend through approval routing and purchase-order-only checkout.

For HBS, personalised stationery is ordered and specified online instead of by email, every order lands in Access Dimensions the moment it is placed, and the print room receives personalised lines already labelled.

For the long term, the module suite is HBS's own, built on Magento Open Source with no licence fees attached to it. The platform has been in production since 2018 and continues to evolve with the business, most recently adding further school finance-system integrations alongside SIMS, IRIS and Sage Intacct.

If you sell to schools, trusts, the public sector or any customer base that buys through procurement systems, this is the kind of store we build. Talk to us about B2B Magento development or Magento ERP integration.