Inventara
An inventory SaaS for the chemical industry, shipped end to end, solo, with governance built into the schema.
Context
Chemical-industry inventory is unforgiving: materials arrive in batches, batches expire, and a stock error is a compliance problem before it is an accounting one. Most inventory tools treat those constraints as edge cases. Inventara is the product I designed and built for that reality: an inventory SaaS for the chemical industry, from schema to interface.
My role
Everything: I designed, built and shipped the product alone. Data model, API, interface, and the operational decisions around backup and recovery.
Approach
- Modelled the master data first (products, third parties and warehouses) and agreed the lifecycle of each entity before writing any application code.
- Built the API with FastAPI over PostgreSQL, keeping the integrity rules in the database where no client can bypass them.
- Built the Next.js interface around the daily flows: goods in, goods out, batch allocation, movement history.
- Tested the constraints deliberately, trying to break referential integrity before a user could.
- Shipped end to end, then kept iterating.
Governance decisions
- Master data with lifecycle rules. Products, third parties and warehouses are governed records: controlled value lists and lifecycle states prevent the duplicates and orphans that quietly corrupt inventory data.
- Batch management with FEFO. Every batch carries an expiry date, and allocation is first-expired-first-out; the system enforces the rule people are tempted to skip.
- Traceability by design. Integrity constraints are tested, and every stock movement is logged, so any quantity on screen can be explained by its history.
- Backups that prove themselves. Off-site backups are encrypted, and restore verification is automated: an untested backup is a hope, not a control.
- Personal-data minimisation. The schema stores the minimum personal data the system needs to operate, and nothing more.
Outcome
Inventara is one of two data products I have designed, built and shipped end to end, solo. The governance here is not a policy document sitting beside the system; it is implemented in the schema, the constraints and the operations. Inventara is a commercial product, so its code stays private.
