Sales flow
Deals opened, priced, approved and confirmed inside the platform, with the rules of who may agree what built in, so a promise made in the field is already a record in the company.
Agricultural supply · Ukraine
One platform for the whole company, shaped to how it actually sells
An agricultural supply company in Ukraine — selling tires and manufacturing dual wheels for tractors — ran on a standard company-management platform that covered accounting well and the rest of the business badly. The tires it sold aged on the shelf, the wheels it made were costed after the fact, the representatives in the field worked outside the system, and the owners learned what had happened from reports assembled afterwards. We customised the platform until it ran the company, not just its books.
- Sector
- Agricultural supply · Tires and dual wheels
- Replaced
- The stock configuration of a standard company-management platform, and the workarounds beside it
- Core
- Sales · Representatives · Warehouse · Barcoding · Production · Accounting · Finance · Dashboards
- Where
- Ukraine
The situation
The platform kept the books. The company ran somewhere else.
- Representatives working from private lists
- The newest tires leaving first, the oldest ageing in place
- Finance reconciling sales and shipments by hand
- Owners reading last month, not today
The company supplied agricultural businesses. Tires were its largest and most awkward product line, and beside the warehouse it ran a workshop making dual wheels for tractors — a product assembled to order from rims, spacers and hardware, and from the tires in stock. A standard company-management platform was already in place, and for accounting it was fine: invoices, payments and tax reporting all went through it. But a standard configuration is built for an average company, and this one was not average. Sales moved through representatives working directly with farms. Stock lived in a large warehouse where a tire is heavy, bulky, and quietly loses value the longer it sits.
So the real workflow lived next to the platform. Representatives kept their own lists of customers, prices and promises. Warehouse workers picked whichever tire was nearest, which meant the newest stock left first and the oldest stayed until it was too old to sell at full price. The workshop built wheels from parts and tires drawn informally from the same stock, so the cost of a finished wheel was worked out afterwards, if at all. Finance reconciled what the representatives had agreed with what the warehouse had shipped, after the fact, by hand.
The owners saw all of this through reports built at month end. They were accurate and late. A question like which representative is selling, which stock is ageing, and how much cash is tied up in tires nobody has moved this season could be answered, but only by someone spending a day on it.
The actual problem
A standard configuration runs a standard company. The work is in the difference.
Starting point
Every department had its own version of the truth.
The platform was the system of record for accounting and nothing else. Sales, warehouse and management each kept the part of the picture they needed, in the tool that was nearest to hand, and the platform found out later — if at all.
- Customer terms and open deals kept by each representative, not in the company system
- Stock quantities correct in total and unknown by location or age
- Tires picked by convenience, so the shelf life of the oldest stock was spent on the shelf
- Dual wheels assembled from parts taken off the shelf without a record, and costed by estimate
- Warehouse receipts and shipments entered from paper, a day or more after the fact
- Finance and accounting reconciled against sales and warehouse records by hand
- Reports for the owners assembled at month end from several sources
How it started
Walk the sale from the field to the loading dock.
We followed a single order from the moment a representative agreed it with a farm to the moment the tires left the warehouse and the money arrived. Every place the order changed hands was a place the standard configuration lost track of it, and those became the list of what to build.
- 01
Map the sales flow
How a deal is opened, priced, approved and confirmed, and what a representative is allowed to decide alone. Written down as a flow the platform could enforce rather than a habit each person had.
- 02
Walk the warehouse
Where each tire type is stored, how a worker finds one, and why the oldest stock was being skipped. The answer was simple: nothing told the worker which tire to take.
- 03
Follow a wheel through the workshop
Which parts and which tires go into a dual-wheel assembly, where they come from, and how the finished wheel gets back into stock as a product with a cost of its own.
- 04
Trace the money
Where finance was reconciling by hand, and which of those reconciliations disappear once sales and warehouse post into the same ledger as accounting.
- 05
Agree what the owners need to see
With the owners: the handful of figures they were asking for every month, defined once so they could be shown live instead of assembled.
- 06
Decide the order of the build
Which department moves first, and what has to be true before the next one can. Sales and the warehouse went first because that was where the money was leaking; the workshop and the dashboards followed on top of them.
Architecture
Keep the standard core. Build the company around it.
The platform's accounting and financial core was sound, and replacing it would have thrown away years of correct records. So the core stayed. Everything the company actually does — selling, storing, picking, shipping, deciding — was built as customisation on top of it, posting into the same records the accountants already trusted. One sale creates the order, reserves the stock, drives the pick, produces the shipment and the invoice, and lands in finance without being typed twice.
- The standard accounting and finance core kept as the single ledger
- Sales, warehouse and management built as customisation on top, not beside it
- Every operational step posts into the same records accounting uses
- Each tire tracked as a labelled, barcoded unit with a known age and location
- A dual wheel is a production order: it consumes parts and tires from stock and returns a finished product with a calculated cost
- Picking order decided by the system from the age of stock, not by the worker
- Owner dashboards read directly from live records, never from a compiled report
What moved in
What the system runs
The engagement was not one feature. It was the whole company, moved onto one platform department by department, so that the same record flows from a representative's first conversation to the owners' dashboard.
Representative access
Each company representative works in the system with their own access — their customers, their deals, their stock availability — instead of a private list that the office finds out about later.
Warehouse management
Receipts, locations, reservations, picks and shipments recorded as they happen, so quantity on hand is known by place and by age, not just in total.
Tire storage with barcoding
Every tire labelled and scanned on arrival, so its manufacturing date and its place in the warehouse are known from the moment it enters.
Physical first-in-first-out picking
An app for warehouse workers that tells them which tire to take — the oldest matching unit, wherever it sits — so identical tires leave in the order they arrived and none of them age past their value.
Dual-wheel production
Wheels for tractors built to order in the company's own workshop. Each assembly is a production order that consumes rims, spacers, hardware and the specific tires it was built on, and posts the finished wheel to stock with a cost calculated from what it actually used.
Accounting and finance
The standard core, now fed automatically by sales, warehouse and production, so the reconciliation finance used to do by hand does not exist any more.
Reports and owner dashboards
Sales by representative, stock by age, cash tied up in inventory, and receivables — live, for the people accountable for them.
Notifications to phones
The events that matter — an order needing approval, a shipment leaving, a payment arriving — sent to the right person's phone as they happen.
Operational complexity
The difficult part was scope, not any single piece. A standard platform resists deep change: customise it carelessly and every vendor update breaks something. Each department's needs had to be built inside the platform's own model, in a way that would survive upgrades and stay consistent with the accounting core, while the company kept selling and shipping every day. The warehouse was the sharpest case. A tire is a tire until you know its date, and then two identical tires are not equal at all — the system had to carry that distinction from the receiving dock to the worker's hand, and on into the workshop, where the same tire might become part of a dual wheel instead of a sale.
Systems approach
Keep the standard core as the ledger. Build every operational area as customisation that posts into it, one department at a time, starting with sales and the warehouse where the company was losing the most, then the workshop. Give each role its own surface — a representative's access, a warehouse worker's app, an owner's dashboard — all reading and writing the same records.
Scope
What it involved
- Sales flow with approval rules built into the platform
- Dedicated access for company representatives
- Warehouse management by location, reservation and shipment
- Barcoded tire storage with manufacturing date on every unit
- Warehouse worker app enforcing physical first-in-first-out picking
- Production orders for dual-wheel assembly with cost from actual parts
- Accounting and finance fed automatically from operations
- Reports and live dashboards for the owners
- Phone notifications on the events that need a person
Working principle
A standard platform is a starting point. The company is the specification.
Questions we get asked
Before you start a project like this
The questions below come up in almost every first conversation. If yours is not here, it is a good thing to open with.
- Why customise a standard platform instead of building from scratch?
- Because the accounting core was already correct and already trusted, and in Ukraine the platform's tax and statutory reporting is a real asset. Replacing it would have spent months rebuilding what worked. Customising it spent that time on what did not: sales, warehouse and management.
- What is physical first-in-first-out, and why does it matter for tires?
- First-in-first-out is usually an accounting convention: the oldest cost leaves the books first, regardless of which physical item was shipped. Physical FIFO means the oldest actual tire leaves the shelf first. Rubber ages, and a tire's value is tied to its manufacturing date, so the difference between the two is the difference between selling stock at full price and discounting it a season later.
- How does the warehouse app know which tire to pick?
- Every tire is scanned on arrival with its manufacturing date and put-away location. When an order is picked, the app looks up the oldest unit of that exact type still in stock, shows the worker where it is, and confirms the pick with a scan. The worker does not decide; the system does.
- How is dual-wheel manufacturing handled?
- As production inside the same platform. A wheel is assembled from rims, spacers, hardware and tires, all of which are already stock items. A production order consumes them, the finished wheel is posted back to stock as a product of its own, and its cost is the sum of what went into it. Selling a wheel then works exactly like selling a tire.
- What do company representatives see?
- Their own customers, their open and past deals, current prices and terms, and what is actually available to promise. They cannot see each other's business or the company's finances, and what they agree in the field is a record in the system from the moment they enter it.
Start with the operation
Talk about your operation.
Every engagement starts the same way, whatever the industry: understanding how the work actually happens.
Show us how it works →