What this is
A multi-tenant inventory and commerce platform we built for market owners who manage stock across one or many stores. The painful first step, turning the supplier documents that arrive in the back office (invoices, packing lists, receipts, restocking sheets) into structured inventory records, is handled by a document-AI ingestion path with a human-review gate before stock counts move.
The product is mobile-first because the operators it serves run their businesses from a phone.
Why we built it
Inventory in SMB and emerging-market retail is dominated by paper and ad-hoc digital documents. Generic point-of-sale systems assume a clean, pre-existing SKU catalog and a reliable barcode scanner. Real operators don’t have either. We wanted to validate that document AI plus a careful product UX could give a small market owner the inventory clarity that a large retailer takes for granted, without forcing them into a system designed for someone else.
What it does
- Multi-tenant SaaS, each store’s data is isolated, with shared platform infrastructure.
- Ingests inventory documents (PDFs, photos, scans) and turns them into structured inventory records via OCR and vision-AI parsing.
- Keeps a human in the loop: parsed documents land in a review queue with the source image and extracted fields before stock counts move.
- Tracks stock movement with manual entry as the current default; designed to extend to point-of-sale, online store, and multi-store management in later phases.
- Mobile-first interface tuned for operators who manage their business from a phone.
Built with
| Layer | Stack |
|---|---|
| Frontend | React + TypeScript + Vite + Tailwind CSS, deployed on Vercel |
| Backend | Express.js (Node.js) |
| Database | PostgreSQL, managed in production, Docker locally |
| AI document parsing | Commercial vision-language API |
| OCR fallback | Open-source OCR engine |
| Reproducibility | Docker Compose (clean clone → running stack) |
What this means for you
If you operate a business where the source-of-truth records arrive as documents (paper, photos, PDFs, screenshots), and the cost of getting them into a structured system is currently borne by someone typing them in by hand, we can:
- Build a document-OCR-to-structured-data system tuned to your actual document corpus.
- Keep a human-review gate in the workflow where the cost of being wrong is high.
- Deliver as a multi-tenant SaaS or single-tenant self-hosted system, mobile-first or desktop-first, depending on how your users actually work.
Want to talk about a similar problem in your business? Contact us.