Outcome

Replaced fragmented retail workflows with a centralized operations platform, eliminating reconciliation errors and providing complete visibility into daily business activity.

Context

Retail operations generate data constantly: sales transactions, inventory movements, customer records, supplier orders, employee activity. In most small-to-medium businesses, this data lives in disconnected systems—a POS terminal here, a spreadsheet there, an accounting package somewhere else.

The result is operational blindness. Inventory counts drift from reality. Financial reconciliation becomes a weekly ordeal. Decisions are made on incomplete information. Errors compound silently until they surface as real losses.

Sales360 was built to solve this. Not as a generic SaaS product, but as a purpose-built system of record for a specific retail operation.

Problem

A retail business needed to consolidate fragmented workflows into a single trusted system.

Who needed it: Business owners and operations staff managing daily retail execution.

What was missing:

• Single Source of Truth: Sales, inventory, and accounting data lived in separate systems with no synchronization.
• Traceability: When numbers didn't match, there was no audit trail to find the discrepancy.
• Operational Reliability: Manual data entry across multiple systems introduced errors at every step.

Why fragmented systems fail

When the POS doesn't talk to inventory, stock levels become guesses. When inventory doesn't talk to accounting, cost calculations drift. When accounting doesn't talk to operations, cash flow surprises become routine. Each disconnection creates a gap where errors hide and compound.

Solution

I built a unified operations platform where every business transaction flows through a single, authoritative backend.

Core Architecture

• Centralized Data Model: Sales, inventory, suppliers, customers, and financial records share a single database with enforced relationships.
• Role-Based Workflows: Each user role (cashier, inventory manager, accountant, owner) sees only relevant functions with appropriate permissions.
• Backend-Authoritative Records: The server is the source of truth. Client applications display and capture data but never determine business state.
• Transaction Logging: Every state change is recorded with timestamp, user, and context. Nothing happens without a trace.

Operational Rules Enforced

1. Inventory Synchronization — Every sale decrements inventory. Every receipt increments it. No manual adjustments without audit records.
2. Financial Consistency — Revenue, cost, and margin calculations derive from transaction records, not manual entry.
3. Order Lifecycle Tracking — Purchase orders, partial deliveries, and supplier payments follow defined state machines.
4. Access Control — Sensitive operations require appropriate permissions. Actions are logged by user.

Why this architecture works

1. Data Consistency: With one database as the source of truth, numbers match across all views and reports.
2. Auditability: Every transaction can be traced from origin to current state. Discrepancies can be investigated, not guessed at.
3. Operational Trust: Staff trust the system because it reflects reality. Decisions improve when data is reliable.
4. Adaptability: As business needs evolve, the platform evolves with them. Purpose-built means purpose-fit.

What Made It Hard

1. Mapping Real-World Workflows to Software Retail operations have accumulated years of informal processes, exceptions, and workarounds. Capturing these accurately—without oversimplifying or over-engineering—required extensive domain immersion. Solution: Iterative development with continuous operator feedback. The system was shaped by actual usage, not assumptions.

2. Handling Partial Orders and Exceptions Real business is messy. Suppliers deliver partial orders. Customers return items weeks later. Payments arrive in installments. Every exception needed a clean, auditable path through the system. Solution: Explicit state machines for order and payment lifecycles. Partial states are first-class concepts, not edge cases.

3. Designing for Non-Technical Users The primary users are not software engineers. The interface needed to be fast, forgiving, and obvious. Training time needed to be minimal. Solution: Task-focused interfaces with sensible defaults. Complex operations are broken into guided steps. Errors are recoverable.

Results

• Daily Operational Use: Sales360 is the primary system for all retail operations. Staff rely on it for every transaction.
• Reduced Reconciliation Effort: End-of-day reconciliation dropped from hours of spreadsheet work to minutes of verification.
• Improved Business Visibility: Owners have real-time access to sales, inventory, and financial position without waiting for manual reports.
• Continuous Evolution: The platform continues to adapt as business requirements change.

Tech Stack

• Node.js: Backend API and business logic.
• PostgreSQL: Relational database for transactional data integrity.
• React: Frontend application for operations staff.
• Redis: Session management and caching.
• Docker: Containerized deployment for reliability.

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