Retail & FMCG · 25+ Locations

From end-of-month spreadsheets to a live, chain-wide intelligence platform.

A multi-format retail group — supermarkets, quick-service restaurants, and a central distribution warehouse — needed one trustworthy view of sales, margin, and cash across every location, every day. Here is how we built it.

THE CHALLENGE

Reporting that arrived too late to act on

Sales, stock, and margin data lived inside the group's ERP but reached decision-makers as static, manually-built spreadsheets — often days after the fact. There was no single, shared view of performance across more than twenty-five stores, restaurants, and a distribution network, and no way for a store manager or executive to simply ask a question about the numbers.

THE APPROACH

Build the pipeline before the dashboard

Rather than starting with charts, we started with the data layer: a governed warehouse fed by real-time and scheduled extracts from the core ERP, with clear staging, reporting, and analytics layers — so every number downstream traces back to a known source.

THE OUTCOME

One platform, three ways to consume it

The same governed data now powers a web dashboard for daily operations, an automated financial reporting suite for finance, and an AI assistant that briefs executives every morning over WhatsApp — with no re-keying between them.

What We Built

A platform with four working layers

Layer 1

Real-Time Data Warehouse

A scheduled and near-real-time pipeline extracts sales, stock, transfer, and general ledger data directly from the group's ERP and lands it in a modelled warehouse, organised into staging, reporting, and analytics schemas — the single source of truth for everything downstream.

Layer 2

Live Operational Dashboards

Daily and intraday sales by store, department, category and product, stock-on-hand, and distribution service-level tracking — with role-based access so a store manager sees their own site and an executive sees the whole network.

Layer 3

Automated Financial Reporting

A monthly flash profit & loss with budget, prior-month, and prior-year comparisons, plus a full statutory reporting pack — Statement of Profit or Loss, Statement of Financial Position, and Statement of Cash Flows — recomputed live from the general ledger on every page load.

Layer 4

AI-Powered Analytics & Briefings

Machine-learning models for demand forecasting, price and margin anomaly detection, and basket analysis, paired with a WhatsApp assistant that delivers a daily briefing and answers free-text questions from the same underlying data.

How We Work

Radical transparency about the data

A reporting platform is only as trustworthy as its honesty about its own limitations. Where a figure doesn't fully reconcile to source — because a balance is tracked in a system we don't yet have access to, or because a subledger doesn't capture every posting — we say so directly in the interface, in plain language, rather than presenting a polished number that quietly hides the gap.

Every statutory statement we build ships with an explicit balance check and a cash-flow reconciliation, shown to the user as a pass/fail — not buried in a footnote.

"If a number can't be traced to its source, the interface should say so — not hide it behind a clean layout."
Results

What changed for the business

25+

Store, restaurant, and warehouse locations reporting into one platform

Daily

Automated executive briefings, replacing manual end-of-month decks

Live

Statutory financials available on demand, not just at period close

On-Demand

Free-text Q&A over sales, margin and stock — no analyst required

Want to see the same patterns on your own data?

Explore an interactive version of this kind of dashboard, built on public sample datasets.