Factory ERP
A phone app that replaced his account books
BeforeEvery entry written by hand. Finding last month’s numbers meant flipping through registers.
NowEntries, dues and reports on his phone — and a year of records searchable in seconds.
The situation
He had been running the factory on paper for years, and it worked — until it didn’t. Every chitthi, every party balance, every payment went into a register. Finding anything from a previous month meant sitting down with a stack of books.
He had tried the common ledger apps, but they were built for a generic shop. Scrap and metals trading doesn’t weigh like a generic shop: gross weight comes in, then bardan, mati and return weight come off it before you have anything worth pricing. None of the off-the-shelf apps had a place to put those numbers, so he ended up keeping the register anyway as a backup. That defeated the point.
So the app got built around his arithmetic rather than around a template — the same fields, in the same order, with the deductions doing the work he was doing on paper.
What I built
Recording a chitthi
Purchases carry the weight deductions the trade actually uses — bardan, mati and return weight come off the gross, and net weight falls out on its own. Sales are simpler, with or without GST. Every chitthi gets a serial number and can go to the party on WhatsApp from the list.
Ledgers and dues
Every party’s balance in jama and udhar, updating as entries go in. Any party’s statement opens with its opening balance, running entries and closing balance for whatever date range he picks — and goes out as a PDF or Excel file without touching a computer.
Registers and entries
Totals by product and weight across any date range — the report that used to take an evening of adding up. Cash payments, receipts and journal entries sit alongside the chitthis, so the ledger reflects money moving as well as goods.
Who can see what
Factory staff and office staff see different parts of the system. The owner can see which devices are logged in and when each was last active, and sign any of them out from his own phone — which matters when the books live on a device someone carries home.
What changed
He stopped using the physical register within two weeks of handover, which was the real test.
A party statement that used to mean an evening with the books now goes out over WhatsApp in under a minute.
The app is his, with no subscription and no per-user charge as he adds staff.