The client
Akbar International carves stone and marble — tableware, decor and inlay work in traditional Pietra Dura and lattice styles — and exports it worldwide. The business runs on two things most software does not model: karigars, the artisans who take raw material away and return finished work, and export paperwork that is filed with customs.
Why off-the-shelf inventory software fails here
A slab of marble does not stay one thing. It arrives as raw material, is issued to a karigar, comes back as carved work, and is finally a finished piece with a SKU — and the same physical stone can be split across several of those states at once. Standard inventory tools count what is on a shelf. They cannot answer where a lot is when it is halfway through being carved in someone else’s workshop.
The system is built around the lot as the unit of inventory, moving through stages with an append-only stock ledger recording every movement, so the on-hand figure is always reconstructable rather than merely asserted.
What we built
- An eight-screen inventory module — dashboard, masters, inward, issue, payments, stock, reports and a reversal-approvals queue
- A ten-screen export module taking a shipment from order form through packing, invoice and the document set customs requires
- Karigar labour booked at the moment work is delivered, not when material is issued — because that is when the quantity done and the agreed rate are actually known
- Which documents a shipment needs is derived from carrier, destination, incoterm and cargo type, then frozen at posting, so an operator never has to remember a rule and a filed shipment cannot change retroactively
- Gapless export invoice numbering that resets each financial year, because those serials are filed with customs and cannot have holes
- Statutory validation shared by the server and the browser from a single source — GSTIN check digit, PAN, TAN, Aadhaar, IFSC
- Editable, versioned document templates that record which version printed each issued document, so a reprint years later is faithful
Two details worth naming
The pricing formulas were not designed, they were recovered. The legacy system’s source code was gone, so its rules had to be derived from the data it left behind and verified against 3,891 historical packages — including discovering that a column labelled CBM had never held cubic metres at all, but dimensional weight.
Foreign-currency and rupee valuations are kept strictly independent rather than one being calculated from the other, because in the legacy records they agreed less than a fifth of the time. Collapsing them would have quietly corrupted every domestic tax invoice.