01 — The challenge
The factory knew its numbers once a month.
Each day someone wrote one page in the DAILY-REPORT register — working day, meter units, profile cutting, production, sales, purchases — and copied yesterday's summary forward by hand. At month end the pages were re-keyed into an eight-tab Excel workbook that reconciled stock: opening plus purchases plus production, minus sales and consumption, across plate, circle, profile-cut, flange and three kinds of scrap. Until that workbook was done, nobody knew the stock position.
Quoting a flange ran off a personal spreadsheet. Accounts lived in a Windows ERP whose only backup was thousands of dated file copies.
02 — What we built
Decode the register, then make the portal produce the same page daily.
The report portal was scoped from nine photographs of the register at 22:00 on 29 August 2026 and was live at report.bhbincorporate.com the same night: the six inputs, the reconciliation engine (13 tests, the client's real 29 August figures reproduced to the rupee), a daily report on screen and as a PDF laid out like the handwritten book, and Excel exports that mirror the old workbook's tabs so month-end still looks familiar.
Three days of use produced version two: coloured sections, a void-and-unvoid for a mis-tap, a master list of parties, and the rule that scrap is stock rather than production. The other four tools followed the same pattern — one real spreadsheet or one real need, turned into a tool the owner uses on his own domain.
03 — The results
A stock position every morning, not every month.
The owner enters the day and the portal reconciles seven categories on the spot; days with no entry are flagged on the dashboard so a gap is visible the next morning, not at month end. The flange calculator's engine matches the old spreadsheet's answer to within a rounding error, with a PDF the customer can be sent.
Five tools in four months for a small factory, each finished and each on the client's own domain — that is the pace an MSME can afford when the workflow is mapped before the code is written.
Before · After
BHB Incorporate's factory reporting: before vs after the report portal
| Metric |
Before |
After |
| Daily record |
Handwritten register page |
Six inputs on screen, PDF in the book's layout |
| Stock position |
Known at month end |
Reconciled every day, seven categories |
| Missed days |
Found while re-keying |
Flagged on the dashboard |
| Flange quotation |
Personal spreadsheet |
Calculator with a branded PDF |