Most people who ask for this do not need it.

That is not modesty. A custom app is the most expensive way to solve a scanning problem and it is the right answer about one time in five. The other four times the job is already done by something that exists, and saying so costs us a sale and saves you a year.

So the first conversation is not about what to build. It is about whether to build anything.

Before you spend anything

Three cheaper answers, and they usually win.

In the order we suggest them. If one of these fits, we will tell you so and there is nothing further to pay us for.

Your system already does it

Most warehouse systems have a scanning module nobody switched on, or one that was switched on badly and then abandoned. It is worth an hour with whoever supports it before it is worth a year of ours.

The scanner can do it alone

A Zebra scanner can be programmed to reformat what it reads, add a prefix, strip a check digit or split a barcode into fields — no app, no server, nothing to maintain. A surprising number of "we need an app" problems are a configuration problem.

Somebody has already built it

Counting stock is the obvious case, which is why we built Stocktakes Online once rather than eleven times. If your problem is a common one, buying it beats commissioning it.

What is left

When building it is the right answer.

It comes down to one thing: the job is specific to how your business works, and that is exactly why nothing off the shelf fits it.

The shape of it

A short sequence, done thousands of times

Scan the bin. Scan the part. Say how many. The apps worth building are almost always three or four steps long and run all day — because that is where a saved keystroke multiplies, and where a wrong one is expensive.

If the sequence needs a screen full of fields, the job is usually a desk job that somebody has decided to do standing up.

The test

Somebody is retyping something

The clearest signal there is. A count on paper that gets keyed in that evening, a despatch list read off one screen and typed into another, a spreadsheet that exists only to get numbers from the floor into the system.

That retyping is the cost. It is measurable, everyone already knows the number, and it is the only thing a custom app reliably removes.

Inventory management, and we say so on purpose. Counting, receiving, moving, checking, and the asset registers that are the same job under another name — a code on a physical thing, a person standing in front of it, and a record that has to be right. We are asked for apps well outside that and we turn them down, because thirty-five years is a long time in one field and no time at all in a new one.

The one decision that shapes everything

Live to the database, or a file at the end of the shift?

Both work. They fail very differently, and that is what decides it.

What we prefer

Real time, straight into your system

The scan goes to the database as it happens and the answer comes back while the person is still standing at the rack. Scan a bin that does not exist and you are told immediately, not at five o'clock. Two people counting the same aisle see each other's work.

It also means the device holds nothing worth losing. A dropped scanner is a dropped scanner, not a lost day.

What we still build

Batch, when the site cannot support live

Stored on the device and uploaded later. It is the right answer where there is no usable coverage — a cold store that kills wireless, a yard, a site where putting in access points costs more than the problem is worth.

The cost is honest and worth saying out loud: every error is found hours after it was made, by which time the pallet has moved.

We have done both for a very long time. Batch is where this business started — Symbol terminals that were docked at the end of a shift because there was no other way. Real time became possible when wireless did, and we installed the wireless too. The preference is not fashion; it is thirty-five years of watching which one gets rung about.

How this works in practice

One at a time, and sometimes the answer is no.

Worth knowing before you plan around us.

Capacity

There is one of us

Custom work runs alongside the hardware, the labels and the support, and it only starts when there is room to finish it properly. If you ring in a month where there is not, we will say so rather than take a deposit and start slowly.

What you get

It runs on hardware we already support

The same Zebra Android computers we sell, service and hold spares for. When a device fails in year three, the app and the hardware are the same phone call — which is the part that goes wrong when the app comes from one company and the scanner from another.

It has been done before, at length. ScanTrack Systems ran from 2008 to 2024 — our own scanning software, on Windows Mobile, doing this job for real customers for sixteen years before Android was the answer. Stocktakes Online is its replacement: our own Android app and web portal, in daily use, built and maintained here. That is the evidence for whether this can be done properly, and it is more use than a page of promises.

Tell us what is being retyped.

That one sentence is usually enough to say whether this is worth building, worth buying, or already solved by something you own. The answer costs nothing either way.

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