Reconciling inventory across three systems that don't talk to each other
This is a hypothetical scenario, not a client project. It illustrates how we'd think through a problem like this one, using the same structure we use for real case studies.
A small retail business ran a point-of-sale system in-store, a separate online storefront, and tracked incoming supplier stock in a spreadsheet. None of the three agreed with each other, and the business was intermittently overselling items that were actually out of stock.
There was no dedicated technical or operations staff — the owner and two employees ran everything. The existing tools were ones the team relied on daily and knew well; replacing them outright wasn't realistic, financially or operationally.
Rather than replacing any of the three systems, the goal was to build the connective layer between them: read from each source, apply clear rules for what counts as the source of truth in a conflict, and flag anything ambiguous for a human instead of silently guessing.
A scheduled backend job pulls stock data from the POS and storefront APIs and parses the supplier spreadsheet on a fixed cadence. A small rules engine reconciles the three, applies safe defaults, and surfaces genuine conflicts in a minimal internal review screen rather than resolving them automatically.
- Existing POS and storefront systems couldn't be replaced — the team depends on them daily
- No dedicated technical staff available to operate anything complex
- Supplier stock data arrives as an inconsistently formatted spreadsheet
- Any automation has to fail safely — a wrong stock count is worse than a slow one
Before touching live inventory, the sync ran in read-only 'dry run' mode for two weeks, comparing its reconciled counts against the team's manual counts to confirm the rules held up before it was allowed to write anything back.
The entire solution lived in the connective tissue between systems that already existed — no new customer-facing software, no rip-and-replace. Sometimes the right build is the one nobody sees.
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