Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)
You can open this one yourself — the Open the live demo button runs the whole system on invented data. Fayad Enterprise imports and distributes across West Africa on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, with sixteen named users. The ERP was not the problem. Business Central charges by the person rather than by the work, so the warehouse hand whose whole job is to receive stock held the same $80 Essentials licence as the accountant closing the books. We built a web front end over it — one screen per role, shaped for that role — and the group’s licence bill came down by half.
What that bought was not only the saving. With every role on its own screen, the group sees itself day by day instead of at month end: which lines earn and which only move, where the cash is going, which vehicles and people are idle, and which costs stopped being justified. Resources get re-allocated on what the screens show, rather than on what the closing eventually reveals.
The profit-and-loss screen in that demo, read live from the ledger — one of twenty screens you can open.
Underneath all of it is the landed-cost engine: the cost of the goods carried the whole way through clearing, handling and delivery, so margin is known on the shelf rather than guessed. Container status arrives automatically from the shipping lines instead of being chased by phone, and profit-and-loss and cash reporting are read live from the Business Central ledger rather than assembled at month end.
The warehouse side runs on a daily loop. Each morning every warehouse manager receives his own restock list — worked out from what sold, what is left on his floor, and what is sitting in the other warehouses — so stock moves between branches before a shelf runs empty rather than after. The target is plain: every warehouse able to supply every product, every day.
When a product runs short across the group, the system works out what each salesperson may promise against the stock actually on hand — rather than everyone selling from the same shrinking number — and pushes that allocation out over Messengers. Credit is tracked by ageing bucket per customer, with cash and bad-debt thresholds, and post-dated cheques are followed through to their clearing date.
The same platform carries the group’s people: staff records, leave requests and approvals. Around that sit bank reconciliation, vehicle and fuel costs, consumables, energy use, facilities maintenance, and performance per item, per warehouse and per salesperson — the things that were living in separate spreadsheets before.
The customers screen in the same demo — every customer’s purchase history month by month, what they buy most, and the balance they are carrying against the limit they were given.
Also in the system: landed cost, container tracking, stock redistribution, rationing, credit ageing, post-dated cheques, bank reconciliation, P&L charts, sales by item, warehouse performance, vehicle expenses, consumables, energy use, facilities maintenance, HR and leave, and reports.
Factory operations & labour costing
FIG makes seasoning cubes and sachets in West Africa. The plant runs on Business Central, and nobody on the floor opens it. Every production role gets a screen shaped like the job instead — supervisor, planner, QA, maintenance — and the application writes into Business Central on their behalf. Operators clock on with a PIN at the line, on a tablet.
The shop floor screen is the plant in one view: every open order by work centre — diffusing and mixing, maturation, compression, wrapping and packing, grinding and sieving, seasoning-powder packing — with what is running, what is maturing and how long it has left, what is waiting on QA, and which machines are on hold for maintenance. A supervisor sees only the work centres and the items he is authorised for, and that authorisation lives in Business Central rather than in the web app.
That arrangement is also where the money is. Business Central is charged per named person, so a plant where everyone touches it directly pays for everyone — and a plant where they do not, does not. Supervisors, QA inspectors, the maintenance team and the line operators sit behind screens built for their job instead. At FIG that took more than sixty per cent off the plant’s licence bill — Essentials is $80 per named user per month against $8 for a Team Member licence, which covers reading, approving and updating records. That saving repeats every month, so over a couple of years it is usually larger than what the system cost to build.
This system is still being rolled out at the plant; a demo on invented data follows when it is complete.
The live shop floor — open orders by work centre, a maturation batch counting down, and what is waiting on QA. Shown here in the application’s own demo build, on invented orders.
The next forty-eight hours, line by line — and underneath, the places where the schedule and the machines disagree: a line booked past its daily capacity, a job that started late, two orders overlapping.
What he records as he goes is output, material consumed, scrap against a reason code, downtime against a reason code, and a note for whoever takes the next shift. Each of those becomes a real Business Central document — an output journal, a consumption posting, a capacity journal, a posted handover — rather than a sheet of paper somebody re-keys the next morning. Three extensions were written into Business Central itself to hold what it had nowhere to put: shift notes, maintenance sessions and QA inspection records.
Planning starts from the other end. The planner builds a multi-day, multi-product schedule against the routings: target quantity, start date, how many days and hours a day, and whether Sundays are worked. The application splits that across the days, names the bottleneck work centre, checks whether the raw material will cover the run, and then pushes the whole schedule into Business Central as firm planned production orders in a single action.
Nothing reaches the ledger unchecked. A batch a supervisor finishes goes into the QA queue against the sampling parameters set for that work centre; QA passes or fails it; what passes moves to the admin queue, and only then is it posted. What fails goes to waste disposition with its reason attached.
Labour cost is worked out and allocated from actuals — who was on which line, for how long — instead of being estimated at month end, and a cost-variance report sets the planned figure beside the real one, item by item.
Around that sit maintenance (preventive and corrective schedules, downtime logging, machines put on hold, spare parts and fixed assets), traceability and recall (lot genealogy end to end — forward from a raw-material lot to every finished batch it went into, and back again), a work-centre calendar that flags where the schedule and the machine capacity disagree, a shift-handover log across every centre, a read-only mirror of what Business Central holds, and sixteen printable reports: executive daily, operations, cost variance, maturation yield, machine health, material forecast, waste analysis, warehouse capacity and the rest.
The master planner, with a five-day run split out and balanced against the target — one button from becoming firm planned orders in Business Central.
The morning brief: output, yield and scrap, planned against actual per product, the materials about to run out, and where yesterday’s downtime went.
Projects finance, payroll & approvals
You can open this one yourself — the Open the live demo button runs the whole platform on invented data. One platform for an engineering and construction firm, with the whole shape of the business in it. Work arrives as a quote; an accepted quote becomes a project with a team, a task list and a payment plan; hours and expenses are booked against that project; the client is invoiced stage by stage; and every one of those steps lands in the ledger as it happens. Five systems and a folder of spreadsheets became one.
The dashboard is what the managing director opens first: active projects, headcount and who is on leave, utilisation and hours booked this week, overtime and idle time, what is sitting in the approval queue, and payroll cost month to date. Beside it, the week’s utilisation split between billable, overtime, idle and time off, and every timesheet in the period broken down by state. The branch selector at the top switches the whole screen between one office and the group.
Nothing moves on trust. A timesheet is approved week by week against the project the hours were booked to — a whole week at once, or a single day, and an approved week can be reversed with the reason kept. Expenses, payroll runs, fund transfers and leave each have their own queue, and every decision is stamped with who made it and when.
Opens the real platform in your browser, on an invented firm with invented figures. There is no sign-in, and every visitor gets their own copy — what you change is yours alone, nobody else sees it, and none of it reaches a real system.
The dashboard a director opens in the morning. Shown here in the platform’s demo build, on an invented company — no client’s figures appear anywhere on this page.
The approval queue, with one engineer’s week open against the project the hours were booked to. Expenses, payroll and leave sit behind the tabs beside it.
The finance side is a hub rather than a report. Net treasury position, gross revenue for the year and operational burn sit across the top; underneath, every project is drawn with its budget against the revenue actually collected, the labour it has absorbed and the expenses booked to it, so a job that is earning and a job that is only moving look different at a glance. Invoices, revenue, post-dated cheques, expenditure, the journal and the audit ledger are each a tab, and a standing integrity check counts what is in the ledger against what the operational side says should be there.
Payroll is assembled from approved hours rather than typed in. Each run picks up base pay, overtime priced at the rate that applied on the day, bonuses, adjustments, tax and social security, and shows the net for every person before anything is committed. A run is generated, approved, then disbursed, and it stays in the registry afterwards with its period, its total and its status, so a question about a payslip from four months ago has an answer.
The security work was done at the start rather than deferred: two-factor sign-in, role-based access with view, edit and delete set per module and overridable per person, a session timeout policy, an audit trail behind every financial entry, and a recycle bin so a deletion is recoverable. Branches carry their own currency and timezone. The platform prints its own branded quotes, invoices and statements, exports to Excel, and starts a new job from a project and task template instead of a blank page.
It happens to be running for an engineering firm, but the platform itself is not written for one industry: the same structure of quotes, projects, approvals and accounting fits a contractor, a consultancy or a trading company. What changes between them is configuration, not code.
The finance hub — treasury, revenue and burn across the top, and every project measured against its own budget underneath.
Payroll runs, with the liability still sitting in approved-but-unpaid hours called out before a run is generated.
NexusPOS — retail point of sale
A till that keeps working when the internet does not. Sales, held sales, returns and receipts run against a local database and reconcile when the connection comes back — which matters here more than it does in most markets.
Behind the till it is a small retail back office: barcode and shelf-label printing, customer statements, supplier ageing, and the charts a shop owner actually looks at — takings by hour, days of cover, debt ageing, stock about to expire, margin against volume.
Staff sign in with a PIN stored as a one-way hash; nobody can read one back, and five wrong attempts locks that till. It installs as a desktop application and each device is activated against a licence.
You can open this one yourself too — the Open the live demo button runs the till in a browser on an invented shop, with its own private copy of the data for every visitor. Sign in with PIN owner / 1234, cashier / 2580 or stock / 1357.
The till, photographed in the live demo on the invented Demo Mart shop: stock on hand on every tile, piece, pack and carton prices, and the basket building on the right.
Industries
We are not a sector specialist and we do not limit the work to an industry list. Underneath, every business runs on the same things: records, stock or jobs, approvals, money in and money out. What changes is the vocabulary and which rules matter.
The systems above happen to be manufacturing, distribution, engineering, projects and retail, because that is who has asked so far. If yours is not on that list, that is not a reason to look elsewhere — tell us how your business actually works and we will tell you honestly whether we can build it.
Talk to usReferences
We would rather you spoke to a client than read a quote we chose ourselves. Ask on the first call and we will put you in touch with someone running one of the systems above.
Everything on this page is a system in daily use. Nothing here is a concept, a pilot or a pitch. Equally, none of it is the boundary of what we build — these are simply the ones already running, and the list grows.
Your system could be the next one on this page
Tell us how the business runs today, and we will tell you honestly what it would take to build something like the above — or, if you are already on Business Central, what the free licence audit would save you.
Talk to us