Operating in Latin America

Our scanner bridge turns a phone into a paired scanner and stores every beep as an auditable event with a device, an actor, a resolution and an exception code. It is one of the better things in the product, and it decides exactly one thing where buyers assume four.

Send a hundred, receive ninety-seven, and the system records the three. Not why, not who, not what they were worth. Returning goods deliberately does require a reason — so the intentional act must explain itself and the unexplained one does not.

Reorder point, safety stock and lead time all live on the item and nowhere else, and every low-stock check compares the national total against them. A distribution centre can sit at zero for a fortnight while the dashboard stays green.

A free-text field with validation is not a smaller version of a coded one. Where a jurisdiction wants a value from a published list, the field either holds it or your document is not the document.

Colombia caps a till receipt at five UVT and Chile publishes a new unit value every single day. Both are legal limits denominated in something other than currency, so a system that stores them as an amount is not wrong yet — it is correct with an expiry date nobody wrote down, and it goes stale without any event occurring at all.

Your customer master holds what you need to know about a customer. It has nowhere to hold what your customer asserts about themselves — and some documents will not clear without it.

A Brazilian invoice line can carry four or five taxes at once, owed to three levels of government. Ours has one column for tax — which is a counting problem rather than a rate problem, and the reform makes the count go up before it comes down.

A payment record carries a reference, a transaction id, an attachment, who recorded it, the balance after it, its currency and the journal entry it produced. It belongs to exactly one invoice — so one transfer settling four invoices needs four records.

An item has one selling price and it is a field. Change it and the old value is gone — no revision, no effective date, no history. The documents remember what they were sold at; the catalogue remembers only the last decision.

Everywhere else, voiding a document is something you do. Here it is something you ask for — and your customer can say no, or say nothing, which is worse.

Matching an order against a receipt against the supplier's invoice is the standard control over paying for goods. We do two of those three. The third is not weakly implemented — it has no data behind it at all, because what we call an invoice is a document we generated ourselves from our own prices.

Colombian law makes the buyer confirm two things by electronic message before a credit purchase supports any deduction: that the invoice arrived, and that the goods did. The second is a statement about the world that only a receiving process can make — which turns the most improvised record in procurement into the one the money waits on.

Almost every compliance obligation belongs to finance and is performed at a desk. This one belongs to the buyer and is discharged on a loading bay — by somebody who has never been told they are part of a control.

Peru sets a monthly valuation cycle for public works with the deadlines written into it — present within the first three days of the following month, supervisor reports within five, entity pays by month end. The binding deadline is not the payment one; it is how fast you can close a month.

The till and the stock valuation once used different definitions of what an item cost. Both were defensible, both were implemented correctly, and the integrity report comparing them reported a variance that was purely a difference of opinion.

Satisfaction ratings can only be submitted by a requester with an account, through the self-service path. Everybody who reached the desk without one is missing from the average, and the average does not say so.

A login here can be revoked the moment you decide to. For contractor and fixed-term accounts we can add a scheduled end date, so the revocation lands on the day it was agreed without anyone having to remember months later.

Nobody adopts an asset register with no assets. The interesting part of a migration is never the file format — it is the four columns you have that the destination has nowhere to put, and deciding in advance which of them you are prepared to lose.

Six questions with structural answers — a number, a yes, a name — including the one almost nobody asks: who maintains the municipal rate dataset, and on what schedule?

Addition is lossy. Store 4 + 3 + 2 as 9 and you can still charge, reconcile and audit the 9 — but the 4 is gone. Why we store the parts alongside the total, and how to spot the places worth keeping separate before you need the detail.