The Problem
An international trade firm handling imports and exports across West Africa was drowning in manual work.
Hundreds of active shipments. Dozens of suppliers. Multiple customs regimes. Margin calculations done on spreadsheets. Documents emailed back and forth. Staff spending hours each day reconciling data that should already be in one place.
The operations director put it plainly: "I cannot tell you at this exact moment which of our shipments is at risk. I have to go through 12 spreadsheets to find out."
That's the kind of problem you can't solve with a better spreadsheet.
The specific pain points:
- ▸No real-time visibility into shipment status across the supply chain
- ▸Customs compliance documents generated manually, with frequent errors
- ▸Duty and margin calculations done in Excel — risky and slow
- ▸No supplier relationship management — everything in email
- ▸No way to spot patterns: which suppliers delay, which routes underperform
Our Approach
Before scoping any feature, we spent three days working alongside the operations team — watching how they moved shipments from order to delivery, how they generated compliance documents, how they calculated margins.
Two things became clear immediately:
- ▸
The data problem was more fundamental than the tool problem. The firm had data everywhere (emails, spreadsheets, WhatsApp, carrier portals) but no single place where it was all connected. The platform needed to be the canonical record of truth.
- ▸
Customs compliance was the highest-risk area. A wrong HS code or a missing document can delay a shipment by weeks. The software needed to catch errors before submission, not after.
Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, PostgreSQL, React Hook Form, Zod
What We Built
Live Shipment Tracking
Every shipment has a complete timeline from purchase order to final delivery. Status is updated by the operations team as it progresses through the supply chain — origin warehouse, export customs, international freight, import customs, destination delivery.
Managers can see at a glance: which shipments are on schedule, which are at risk, and which need attention today.
Supplier and Buyer Management
A full relationship management system for the firm's suppliers and buyers. Each supplier profile tracks their history, lead times, pricing tiers, and reliability score (calculated automatically from delivery performance data).
Compliance Document Generation
The platform generates compliance documents — packing lists, commercial invoices, certificates of origin, customs declarations — directly from the shipment data. No copy-pasting between Excel and Word.
An HS code classification assistant suggests the correct tariff codes based on product descriptions and flags potential issues before documents are submitted.
Margin and Duty Calculator
Real-time margin calculations for every shipment, factoring in purchase cost, freight, import duties, insurance, and destination taxes. The calculator pulls duty rates from a maintained database and flags when margins fall below the firm's minimum threshold.
Multi-Currency Support
The firm operates in GHS, USD, EUR, and GBP. The platform handles currency conversion with daily rate updates and tracks every transaction in the appropriate currency with automatic conversion for reporting.
The Outcome
- ▸80% reduction in manual data entry — documents generated from shipment data, not typed from scratch
- ▸3× more shipments handled with the same operations headcount
- ▸Compliance error rate dropped to near zero — the classification assistant and validation rules catch most errors before submission
- ▸Same-day margin visibility — no more waiting for the monthly Excel reconciliation
The operations director's test: "Can I tell you right now which shipments are at risk?" After deployment: "Yes, here are three."
What We Learned
Trade operations software has to be fault-tolerant. Shipments get delayed, documents get rejected, suppliers give wrong information. The software needs to handle partial data, in-progress states, and corrections without losing the audit trail.
The other lesson: multi-currency is hard to retrofit. We baked it in from day one, which saved significant complexity later.
And perhaps the most important: the users were not developers. The UI had to be clean enough that the operations team adopted it without training videos. Every screen had to earn its place.