A custom ops dashboard that replaced nine spreadsheets
Inventory lived in Shopify, purchase orders in Sheets, and fulfilment in a WhatsApp group. We built a Next.js operations app on a clean Postgres model with marketplace APIs writing into one source of truth.
9 → 1
systems consolidated
-14 hrs
manual work per week
99.9%
stock accuracy
The challenge
Operations ran across nine spreadsheets, two marketplace back-ends and a WhatsApp group. Two people spent most of Monday reconciling stock, and overselling happened roughly weekly because Shopify and Amazon inventory drifted apart between manual syncs.
The team had already tried three off-the-shelf tools. Each one modelled inventory in a way that didn't match how they actually bought — in mixed containers, months ahead, against forecast.
What we did
Modelled the business before the UI
We spent the first two weeks on the data model alone, sitting with the ops team. Purchase orders, container shipments, landed cost and stock movements got proper entities. Almost every difficulty with the previous tools traced back to this being wrong.
Made one system the source of truth
Marketplace APIs write into Postgres and the app pushes availability back out, rather than any two channels talking to each other. Every movement is an append-only row, so stock is derived rather than stored and can always be reconstructed.
Built for the actual Monday workflow
The first screen shipped was the one that replaced the worst spreadsheet, not a dashboard. Adoption was immediate because it made the hardest recurring task faster on day one.
Left it maintainable
Typed end to end, seeded test data, and a written runbook. The client's own developer shipped the fourth feature without us.
The outcome
Nine systems became one. Reconciliation work dropped by about 14 hours a week, and stock accuracy across Shopify and Amazon has held at 99.9% with oversell incidents effectively eliminated.
The app has since grown a supplier portal and landed-cost reporting, both built by the client's in-house team.
Tell us what's stuck.
We'll audit the account or the codebase, show you what we'd change, and only pitch if we think we can move the number.
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