From whiteboard, paper and phone calls to one connected flow — order to invoice
A recycling operator ran ~600 transport orders and ~350 invoices a month on a whiteboard, paper order slips and phone-reported weights with two days a month spent re-keying everything into the accounting system. We build operational platforms where the order is the system: customer → order → driver → weight → invoice, with the article register as the pricing engine.
Challenge
The problem pattern.
A customer calls. Someone writes the order down by hand, enters it into Excel, prints a paper slip and sorts it into a tray per truck type. Drivers come to the office one to three times a day to read a physical board. At the weighbridge, weights are reported by phone and pencilled onto the paper order, which goes into an invoicing binder. At month-end, someone spends two days re-keying it all into the accounting system.
Solution
What we build.
A digital operations platform around one connected core flow: Customer → Order → Driver → Execution → Weight → Invoice.
- The order is the system. Everything else — customers, sites, containers, articles, drivers — exists to support the order object and its status flow, with an audit trail and a status machine that blocks invalid transitions.
- The article register is the pricing engine. Base prices per material/service plus customer-specific margins; price changes propagate automatically from a set date. Live price preview at order entry.
- A driver view that beats paper. Mobile-friendly: my orders, details, mark done, enter weight, report deviations (different material, different container size) on the spot.
- Collective invoicing. Completed orders roll up per customer per month and generate draft invoices in the accounting system via API, with a control step before sending.
- Zero-friction principle: creating and completing an order must be faster than today's manual routine — otherwise it won't be used. Adoption before features.
- Multi-tenant from day one where a group structure exists, so sister companies can join without a rebuild — without over-engineering phase one.
Architecture
How it’s put together.
Node.js/Express APIs, a document database for fast iteration on dynamic order and price structures, React front-ends for dispatch and drivers, accounting-system integration for collective invoices, weighbridge integration as a later phase. Staged rollout: two pilot users first, never big bang — in an industry where a botched system switch has cost peers four months of unsent invoices.
Questions about your flow
Can order, delivery and invoicing run in one system?
Yes, once the order is the system rather than a document handed between people. Customer, order, driver, weight and invoice sit on one record, priced from the article register. The re-keying between a paper flow and the accounting system disappears, and the month-end reconciliation shrinks with it.