SLE Mensajeríacourier companyBuenos Aires
1,656deliveries tracked in the system, across 3,680 documents
A morning of cross-checking, closed in five minutes.
How it was before
SLE is a courier company in Buenos Aires that has been in business for eight years, with couriers on the street every day. Marcela owns it, and she is my mother: SLE was the first system I wrote, tested at home before I sold one to anyone else. Much of the work is for 39 business clients who pay on account.
They worked off Excel spreadsheets and tracked deliveries with paper dockets, and it took an office clerk to enter them one by one. Settling up with the couriers meant cross-checking those spreadsheets, and it took her a whole morning. Every delivery was written down somewhere, but never all in the same place, so each company’s month had to be rebuilt by hand.
What I built
A panel with every delivery and its status, a live map of the couriers, the courier settlements, an account for each business client with its monthly statement as a PDF, and the cash. It holds 1,656 deliveries across 3,680 documents, and 1,234 of those documents came in over a twelve-day stretch.
Plain JavaScript in one file, no build step · Firestore with security rules and an audit log · a live map · spreadsheet export · Vercel
The interface is in Spanish today. Which language it ships in is set per build.
The decisions, and why
It was built in stages, and the order was not an accident.
First the daily delivery entry, which is what gets done every morning. Then the client list, imported from their own spreadsheets. Then the accounts and the dashboard, the monthly statement as a PDF, the live map with permissions per employee, and last the digital dockets, which the courier signs on his phone at every address. It was my first system: it broke more than once and I learned on it.
The panel lives on the office computer.
Settlements get closed sitting down, with the day’s paperwork at hand. It is the opposite of the gym case, where payments are taken standing behind the counter.
Settlements are calculated per period.
Cross-checking delivery by delivery is what ate the morning, and a system that repeated that path would have been useless.
Available cash is shown apart from the month’s result.
Business clients pay on account. With only the month’s result on screen, the panel showed months in the red when the money was already there.
Before and after
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Spreadsheets cross-checked by hand | One panel with every delivery |
| Settlements, delivery by delivery | Settlements per period |
| Each company’s month, rebuilt by hand | A monthly statement per company, as a PDF |
| Paper dockets | Digital dockets, signed on the courier’s phone |
| The history, in someone’s memory | A history you can filter and export |
It used to take me the whole morning to close the settlement, cross-checking spreadsheets. Now I open the panel and close it in 5 minutes. What a change.
The system, running
Where it is
SLE Mensajería
Av. Directorio 1019, Buenos Aires
5.0 on Google · 1,029 reviews
See the listing on Google MapsEmail me about a system like this, or about a role
I quote a custom system within 24 hours. If you are hiring, my resume is one page.
WhatsApp: +54 9 11 2469-3394