The problem nobody wanted to touch
An online retailer was reconciling 400+ daily orders against their warehouse's stock system by hand. Every evening, two staff members cross-checked spreadsheets — and every week, one or two mismatches slipped through, causing refunds, angry customers, and a quiet acceptance that this was just how things worked.
The cost of the errors was never the point. The cost was that nobody trusted the numbers.
What we built
A small reconciliation script that compares order totals, quantities, and shipping statuses between the store database and the warehouse export — then flags only the rows that actually disagree. No dashboards, no workflow overhaul. One script, one daily run, one email with a summary.
The results
- 90% fewer discrepancies reaching customers — mismatches are now caught the same evening
- 2 hours of daily manual work returned to the team every day
- Zero new infrastructure — it runs on the server they already had
The fix took nine days from proposal to delivery. The proposal, as always, was fixed-price and written before a single line of code.
