Three countries, eight cities, one system: tracking spray-foam raw material at Mister PENA

What it looked like day to day

• The crew loads the drums and drives to site — sometimes to the next city, sometimes to another country. The job runs for several days.
• The foreman lowers a dipstick into the polyol drum and records the level before work starts and after it finishes. Nothing more is asked of him — he measures, he does not calculate.
• The reading, in centimetres, goes to accounting.
• The accountant converts centimetres into kilograms by hand, works out the isocyanate consumption separately from the formulation, and files the write-off.
• Until that conversion is done, the consumption does not exist in the system at all.

Converting each trip by hand is not difficult, but it is fiddly and endlessly repeated. Multiply it by the number of crews, sites and branches and you get a constant background load on accounting that still leaves the company without a current picture.

What exactly stopped working

The company grew: more regions, more trucks, more warehouses — and with them, more manual conversion. Nobody was doing the arithmetic carelessly. But the scheme had a ceiling, and the company hit it.

• Stock levels were unclear. This is what brought them to us. How much material is in this particular truck, at this particular warehouse, right now — nobody could answer quickly.
• Data always lagged. Consumption appeared in the records only after an accountant had processed the readings. Until then, the figure in the system did not match reality.
• Planning ran on guesswork. Whether there was enough material for the next job or a drum had to be shipped was settled by phone calls and estimates — and a wrong call meant either a missed schedule or a pointless run across half the country.
• Cross-border reconciliation turned into a message thread. Every branch had its own spreadsheets in its own format, and the overall picture was assembled by hand.
• Accounting became the bottleneck. The speed of record-keeping was capped by the speed of specific people doing manual work.

Excel: easier to calculate in, impossible to manage from

The client had already tried moving the calculations into spreadsheets. Excel genuinely removes part of the arithmetic — our own consumption calculator lives in it. But the manual work was still slow and laborious, and more importantly a spreadsheet does not solve three things: it does not separate access between branches in different countries, it does not keep a history with an author against each change, and it does not tie consumption to the movement of material between warehouses. A file forwarded through a messenger cannot be the source of truth for eight cities.

The manufacturing module: right on paper, harmful in practice

The manufacturing route was the obvious first candidate: there is raw material, there is a formulation, there is consumption — so, manufacturing. MoySklad even ships a dedicated module for it, with recipe cards and consumption norms.

The problem is that a manufacturing flow describes raw material turning into product that lands in a warehouse. Mister PENA has no such product — the result of the work stays on the customer's site. To push consumption through manufacturing anyway, we would have had to invent a fictional finished good, issue it with a document and write it off in the same breath. That means extra paperwork on every single trip, extra load on people, and a rigid formulation in a business where real consumption depends on temperature, layer thickness and the geometry of the surface.

We dropped the manufacturing flow and solved the task with a simpler document type. The principle matters more than the specific setting: never force a system to describe an entity that does not exist in the business. The moment you invent a fictional object for the sake of a "correct" scheme, you pay for it every working day.

One shared warehouse: quick to set up, useless to work with

We could have held all the material in a single warehouse and noted which truck it belonged to in a comment field. Fast to configure — and it kills the entire point of the project. A stock report built that way shows the company's total tonnage and answers none of the one question the whole effort was for: how much material is in this truck right now. A comment on a document cannot be summed into a report.

A truck is a warehouse

Each region has a central warehouse where material arrives from the supplier, plus a separate warehouse for every working truck. Issuing material to a crew is a transfer between warehouses — a recorded handover of accountability. The stock report shows how much isocyanate and polyol sits at the central warehouse and how much is in each truck individually. Isocyanate and polyol are received as a set, in one operation instead of two.

A dipstick reading becomes kilograms

The crew still does exactly what it always did: measures the polyol level with a dipstick and reports centimetres. Nobody in the field picked up a new duty — and that is deliberate, because record-keeping that demands new skills from a crew does not survive contact with a working week.

What changed is the accounting work. iWeb built a consumption calculator: pick the foam type, enter the level before and after, and out come polyol, isocyanate and total consumption in kilograms. Conversion by fixed coefficients and the second component derived from the formulation both happen automatically. The accountant gets finished figures and files the write-off straight away.

The write-off happens where the consumption happened

Consumption is filed as a write-off from the warehouse where it actually occurred — from the specific truck, not from a common pool. The document records the expense category, and the comment records the site. That is what keeps the balance on each truck factual rather than inferred.

Three countries in one system

Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan work in one account without getting in each other's way: the product catalogue is shared, while warehouses and documents are isolated by department. A branch employee sees their own warehouses, transfers and write-offs; management sees the consolidated picture across all eight cities. A new region deploys from the ready-made scheme — scaling took about a week.

Print templates built for the reporting they actually use

The stock print templates did not cover what the client needed on paper. iWeb built custom write-off journal templates — a summary by document and a detailed one by line item, with the date, source warehouse, expense category and a comment on the work. A report that used to be assembled by hand for every request now prints from the system.

The stock that "was not there"

The most instructive episode of the project. Staff at the Kazakhstan branch opened the stock report and saw an empty table. The material was physically in the warehouse, the receipt documents were filed, management could see everything correctly — and the branch saw nothing.

First hypothesis: warehouse permissions. We checked — the warehouses were visible. Second: document permissions. Also visible. Logic pointed at warehouse settings, and that is exactly where we lost the most time.

The real cause was elsewhere. The stock report builds its rows from the product catalogue, not from warehouses. The material items had been created under a different department while product visibility was restricted. The branch employee could see the warehouse and could see the document — but could not see the product itself. And the report honestly returned nothing: there was nothing to build rows from.

Two departments with identical names

A related find. Two different departments can exist with exactly the same name — they are separate objects with separate identifiers. An employee is attached to one, the products were created under the other. Visually everything looks right and functionally it is wrong, and the system will never show you an error. Check the links between objects, not the labels on screen.

The print template the system refuses

Custom print templates turned out to be an engineering task of their own. The file opened locally without complaint and the system refused to accept it. The cause is the format: the print engine requires one strictly specific variant of an older spreadsheet format, and a file that looks identical may not match it. We added a normalisation step to the template build — after that, forms were accepted first time, and any new report variant is quick to produce.

A centimetre that is not always a centimetre

The level of material in a drum shifts slightly with temperature, so the same full drum reads differently in summer heat and in winter cold. Perfect accuracy does not exist here in principle.

We fixed a single set of conversion coefficients and one measurement method for every crew. The error did not disappear, but it became the same everywhere — which means figures from different crews in different countries are now comparable with each other. For management accounting, comparability matters more than an unreachable absolute accuracy.

What this means for the business

• Accounting work got lighter and faster. The routine per-trip conversion left the daily job description.
• The data became current. The figure in the system reflects reality, not the state as of the last manual processing run.
• Management sees the company's resources without assembling the picture by phone. Purchasing and scheduling decisions come from data.
• Growth stopped running into manual labour. A new city or region connects through the ready-made scheme.