Operations Platform for a Snack-Vending Estate

The problem

The owner checked sales each day in a card-payment portal that was being retired, and did the weekly ordering by exporting sales and copying them by hand into a spreadsheet for each producer: a few hours every week. He suspected some figures were short.

When we mapped the estate, three card terminals turned out to have been selling for months without showing up in the figures the owner was working from.

What is live

• Card sales pulled from the payment provider every 15 minutes, across every site.
• Each sale matched to the product that sold, using each machine's slot layout: 99.5% of sales matched in the week measured.
• Sales, sites, reports and insights that set trade against the weather, school terms, bank holidays and local events.
• A weekly ordering snapshot, split by area and exportable, replacing the hand-built producer spreadsheets.
• Text alerts when a card reader disconnects, a 7am nudge if it is still down, and a text for each new site's first sale. Quiet hours apply overnight, but a disconnected reader is never held back.
• Owner editing for sites and products, behind invite-only sign-in.

Figures you can trust

Every week tested has been reconciled site by site against the card provider's own figures: nine weeks, to the penny, once the missing sales the platform uncovered had been recovered. A second automated check proves that every number on screen equals the raw sales rows behind it.

Speed matters when the owner checks on the move: performance work took the insights page from 12.7 seconds to a quarter of a second on a cold load.

How it is built and run

Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel, with a Postgres database protected by row-level security on every table. The application and the data are both hosted in London.

Every production deploy runs a preflight first: type checks, more than a thousand automated tests, configuration checks and a full build. Database changes are additive and reversible.

Managed service

Serqet runs the platform for a fixed monthly fee covering hosting, database administration, security updates, monitoring and fault response, backups with point-in-time recovery, small corrections, and onboarding new sites and producers. New features are quoted separately.

What comes next

A single weekly summary email in place of the daily ones, two-step sign-in, and a second phase covering stock-out alerts and automated supplier ordering.

Technology

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Postgres with row-level security
• Vercel (London)
• Card-payment provider API
• SMS and email alerts
• Vitest

Related

• An operations dashboard for a dairy vending fleet