Sales & Inventory Management System for a Distribution Business
For Mindanao MVP Enterprise · October 28, 2021
Result
The business now uses it every day in place of its spreadsheets and paper records. It has 125+ screens, 45 report templates and about 42,000 lines of code. Transfers can’t leave stock half-moved, every stock movement can be traced, and the invoice screens load much faster since I reworked their queries and added an index.
Problem / case
A growing retail and distribution business was running purchasing, stock, sales and collections on spreadsheets and paper. Stock was held in several locations, so it was hard to know what was on hand or explain where items had gone. Customer balances and supplier payables were reconciled by hand. Reports had to be put together manually, and nobody could tell who had changed a record.
Solution
I built MVP SIMS, a Windows desktop app (VB.NET, WinForms). Every workstation runs it, and they all connect to one central MySQL database on the office network. It covers the whole business cycle in one place: *Sales: invoicing, returns, voids, delivery updates and pick lists *Purchasing: purchase orders and supplier returns *Inventory: goods received, adjustments, transfers between locations, and a movement trace that shows where each item went and why *Finance: receivables and payables, payments, deductions, a cheque register and statements of account *Reporting: 45 printable reports, including sales by SKU, salesman, customer and outlet, customer aging, and commissions *Control: user accounts, admin approval for sensitive actions, and a log of user activity Stock transfers are saved as a single database transaction, so a transfer either finishes completely or doesn’t happen at all. Built-in backup and restore, plus a server health check, keep it reliable on a small office network.
