The quote
that becomes
the invoice

A freight desk priced air and sea in spreadsheets, mailed them as PDFs, then retyped the accepted one into an invoice. Now every figure is entered once.

CLIENT: Confidential — freight forwarding
SECTOR: Freight forwarding & logistics
SCOPE: Architecture, build, deployment
DURATION: 12 days — 66 commits
TEAM: 1 engineer, agent-assisted

12→1d

SECOND FREIGHT MODE, TO LIVE

9.5k

AIRPORTS + PORTS SEEDED

1788

TESTS, GREEN AT EVERY MERGE

DOCUMENTS RE-KEYED PER JOB

THE BRIEF

Nothing was missing. Everything was retyped.

Two freight modes on one desk. Air prices per kilo against a flight, sea per container against a sailing. Quotes lived in Excel, rates in email, the accepted one was retyped into the ledger and the invoice retyped again.

The obvious fix was a general ERP with a freight add-on. Each one quoted asked the desk to price sea the way it prices air, or to run two products side by side. That asymmetry is the business — flattening it sells them their own workaround.

CONSTRAINTS

Air prices per kilo, sea per container — no core could pretend they are alike.
One deployment per client, on their own VPS: no shared database, no per-seat licence.
A blocked CDN still has to submit and validate the quote, not degrade politely.
Every AI surface had to vanish on one setting — not every buyer wants AI in an ERP.

THE BUILD

Four phases. Twelve days.

/01

Listen

Sat with the desk through a live air quote and a live sea quote, writing down every figure it typed more than once.

D 1

/02

Architect

Modelled one abstract quotation both modes inherit, with money, numbering and workflow owned by a service layer neither mode copies.

D 2

/03

Build

Shipped air, then sea, then the customer portal, proforma, tax invoice and carrier tracking that hang off an accepted quote.

D 3—10

/04

Operate

Added the MCP server an agent files enquiries through, the dashboard that reads every register, and the per-client Dokploy deploy.

D 11 →

WHAT WE SHIPPED

Air & sea quotation modules PER KILO / PER CONTAINER

Customer portal ACCEPT / DECLINE / UPLOAD

Proforma & tax invoicing ADVANCE / RECEIPTS / AGEING

Carrier tracking AWB / CONTAINER / B-L

MCP server for agents SIX TOOLS / SCOPED KEYS

STACK ON THIS PROJECT

BACKEND

DATA

UI & DOCUMENTS

AI & INFRA

THE OUTCOME

Four documents. One computation.

BEFORE / AFTER

Second freight mode, to live 12 days → 1 day

Places money is defined 3 → 1

Endpoints kept by hand 9,490 → 0

Documents re-keyed per job 4 → 0

“Sea shipped the day after air, because the core had already refused to know which mode it was serving. 1,788 tests keep it that way.”

BUILD NOTE — WEIRD LABS