Our own product

Inventory and P&L System

Purchasing, stock, market price and margin on one line

The core system behind a collectibles trading business: scan to intake, inventory management, automated market price collection and live profit calculation. In daily use, on real trading data.

Type: Inventory system
Scope: System design
Scrapers
Scheduling
Mobile
Industry: Collectibles trading

Dashboard with units held, market value, unrealised margin and a six-month profit trend (figures are illustrative; real business numbers are not shown) — Fig.1Dashboard with units held, market value, unrealised margin and a six-month profit trendfigures are illustrative; real business numbers are not shown

The challenge

When the goods have a moving market price, bookkeeping is not the hard part. Knowing what the stock is worth right now is. Cost can live in a spreadsheet, but the market moves daily, and without checking you genuinely do not know whether you are up or down. Checking by hand is something people abandon after about two weeks.

024 key points

What we built

Phone barcode intake, which the whole system depends on
Barcodes are scanned straight in on a phone, with a continuous mode for whole batches. Intake finishes as goods arrive rather than becoming a pile of data entry - and if this step is awkward, every stock and margin number downstream is permanently out of date.
Market prices collected automatically
Scrapers against several external marketplaces on a daily schedule. Manual price checking does not survive two weeks, so automation is the only form this can take.
Three independent schedules
Price refresh, data backup and market intelligence each run on their own schedule without interfering with one another.
Used on mobile as a PWA
Scanning needs camera access over a secure connection, so certificates were set up to make the phone usable safely on the local network.

03Figs 2–4