Systems in production, not slides about systems.
Everything we build is custom. Below is a live build running an importer's daily operation, the twenty patterns we start from, and the project shapes we take on most often.
The build
From six disconnected systems to one operational view
~2,900 SKUs / 5 sales channels / imported product / owner-operated
A wholesale importer selling through a marketplace, their own site, US dealers, international distributors and trade shows. Inventory lived in the ERP. Distributor revenue lived in the accounting system. Freight status lived in an inbox. Nobody could see the whole picture without a person spending most of a morning assembling it by hand.
What we found
- Purchasing decisions made from a report that was three days stale by the time anyone read it
- Units already on the water never subtracted from reorder quantities, so the same SKU got bought twice
- International distributor revenue invisible in the ERP entirely
- Container status reconstructed by searching email, one shipment at a time
- 51 exclusive and limited-edition projects tracked in a single spreadsheet, on one laptop, maintained by one person
What we built
- Six connectors feeding one canonical schema: ERP, marketplace API, storefront, accounting, sheets, and a manual freight source
- A purchasing engine that nets inbound units and applies per-vendor lead times
- Role-based views for ownership, purchasing, accounting and custom projects
- A two-stage project model, from resin order to production order to promised ship month, that the ERP could not represent
- A messaging agent that turns a chat message into a finished contract, ready to send
Name withheld by agreement / live walkthrough available on a call
Twenty patterns we start from
Not a menu. Each of these is a job we've built before, and yours will land somewhere between two of them. The pattern is what's proven; the build is yours.
The projects we take on most often
Six company shapes we see repeatedly, with the build that solves each one and what a project like it runs.
Housewares importer, 4,000 SKUs
Sells on a marketplace and into regional chains. Purchasing runs off a monthly export, and by the time it's built the fast movers are short and the slow movers have already been reordered.
4 weeks / $6,000–$8,500
Apparel wholesaler, 60 dealers
Orders arrive as emails, PDFs and photographs of handwritten sheets. Two people spend most of Monday and Tuesday keying them in, and the mistakes only show up at invoicing.
3 weeks / $5,500–$8,000
Specialty food distributor
Landed cost hasn't been recomputed since freight moved. Several SKUs are selling below true cost and nobody will notice until the year-end close.
3 weeks / $5,000–$7,500
Roofing company, 3 crews
Storm season triples the call volume for six weeks. Half the calls ring out, voicemails get returned the next afternoon, and by then the homeowner has signed with whoever answered.
3 weeks / $5,500–$8,000
Remodeler, 40 jobs a year
Estimates go out and never get chased. Change orders happen verbally on site and turn into an argument at final invoice, usually with the customer you liked most.
4 weeks / $6,500–$8,500
Landscaping and maintenance
Crews start the day with a round of phone calls about where to go and what to bring. Two trips back to the yard a week is a whole crew-day lost every month.
3 weeks / $5,000–$7,500
What we don't build
Three things we turn down often enough to be worth saying out loud.
EDI onboarding
Big-box retailer EDI is a specialist trade with its own certification cycles. We'll connect to your EDI provider's output, but we won't be your EDI provider. We can point you at one.
Replacing your platform
We build on top of what you already run. If your ERP or job software genuinely is the problem, that's a different project with a different vendor, and we'd rather tell you than sell around it.
Anything that spends money alone
Anything that places an order, issues a credit or sends a contract stops for a person. That's a design decision we make on purpose, not a limitation we're working on removing.
Which one would yours be?
Two minutes in the estimator narrows it down and gives you a real range. Fifteen minutes on the phone usually settles it.
hello@charidan.com