One shop, one back office, one system

Where it started

A young business on the French-German border, founded in 2024, with no employees: the owner builds everything himself. He sells to end customers in three language markets. What was missing was not a website but the path from order to invoice, without rebuilding it by hand three times.

What was built

• A website in German, French and English. Content is written in German first; a check shows which translations are still missing.
• A shop with variants, PayPal checkout, shipping or collection.
• Production: orders, bills of materials, stock. Nothing is made in series - every piece is built once, and the order knows it.
• Back office: quotes, open items, dunning, invoices as Factur-X to EN 16931.
• Content: news posts with automatic publishing to Facebook and Instagram.

One workflow in detail

An order does not pass through a warehouse but through a workshop. The system models exactly that:

1. 1 The customer orders in the shop and pays.
2. 2 The order moves to "in production" - the piece is built, not picked from a shelf.
3. 3 The bill of materials draws the material from stock.
4. 4 Shipping with a tracking number; the step cannot be completed without one.
5. 5 The invoice is created from the order - XML embedded in the PDF, one file for both readers.

Limits

This is not a system for series production and not a point-of-sale solution. It does not model resellers, batches or shelf life. A business producing in quantity needs something else - that is a decision, not a gap.

Questions

How long does a system like this take?

It depends on scope. The path is always the same: a conversation, a questionnaire, a fixed-price quote, then the build. You know the cost after the second step.