BLAQ

The situation

A print, signage or display business runs a lot of moving parts. A single order can mean a quote with dozens of line items, artwork approval, production across several machines, packing into mixed consignments, delivery to many sites, installation on site and an invoice at the end.

These businesses were running on a legacy job-management system, and that system was ours. It had grown over many years, it did the job, and it could not be changed. Every new requirement meant working around it. Taking customers to the next level meant starting again. Around it sat the spreadsheets, email threads and re-keying that every old system collects: the same order was keyed into the quote, the job sheet and the accounting system. Nobody was sure what stage a job was at without walking the floor. Stock was counted by eye. A management report took a day to assemble, so it was done once a month and read once it was already out of date. Growing the business meant hiring people to push paper.

What they got

BLAQ: the legacy system rewritten from the ground up, and extended to cover what every customer needed rather than what the old system allowed. Built and run by our AI engineering team under a human lead, with the customers’ history carried across.

One platform from quote to invoice. A quote becomes a job with one action. The job appears on a production board the floor works from, moves into packing and dispatch, is delivered and installed with the evidence captured on a phone, and is invoiced into Xero without anyone retyping it.

Owners and managers see where every job is from any screen. Staff on the floor, in the van and on site work from an Android app or an iOS PWA. Customers see their own orders and invoices and approve quotes from a link. New features arrive as continuous releases, and every one is approved by a person before it reaches a customer.

What BLAQ is

BLAQ is a web-based job management and ERP platform built for this industry. It is multi-tenant, so each customer runs on their own isolated data with shared infrastructure, and it is modular, so a business can start with quoting and jobs and add the rest as they grow.

Quoting and jobs. Product templates with dimensions, materials and pricing rules. Quotes become jobs with one action. Document numbering, PDF output and email follow the tenant’s own formats.

Production workflow boards. Configurable templates with stages, timers, approvals and equipment queues. The board is where the floor lives, on a screen or a tablet.

Pack and ship. Scan-driven packing into packages and consignments, carrier rate quoting and labels, branch transfers, and a deliveries board that shows what is leaving today.

Deliveries and installation. Drivers and installers get a magic-link portal on their phone: scan what arrived, mark what went up, photograph it, sign it off and report faults that become remediation jobs.

Campaigns. Multi-store rollouts imported from a spreadsheet, planned on a matrix of sites and items, exploded into summary quotes and production, then tracked on installation and production dashboards.

CRM. A mobile-first view for sales reps: customers, contacts, notes, engagement nudges and a weekly summary.

Purchasing and stock. Purchase orders, goods received, stock levels and allocation against jobs.

Integrations. Xero through Make.com for invoices, payments and contacts. Stripe for billing and customer payments.

Reporting and templates. A template engine for quotes, invoices, job sheets, labels and management reports, editable per tenant.

Customer portals. Customers see orders, invoices and campaigns, approve quotes from a link, and sign in with single sign-on where the business wants it.

White-label. Branding, features and infrastructure are configured per deployment, so the platform can be offered under another name for a vertical.

Mobile. An Android app and an iOS PWA for the floor, the van and the site, with push notifications.

How it is built

BLAQ is the proof of the method on How we work. Every area above is owned by a specialist agent with a written brief: workflow, pack and ship, shipping rates, campaigns, installation, CRM, portals, integrations, cost accounting, reporting, white-label, mobile, plus general backend and frontend. A fixed ownership table routes each task to its specialist. Planning roles write the spec. Quality roles review the diff against the spec, write the tests and hunt regressions, and three of them cannot edit code at all. One release role is the only thing allowed near a server.

Guardrail hooks sit in front of every action. They stop a deploy from a coding session, a commit without its tests, a secret in source, a migration that is not re-runnable, a branch switch that would clobber someone else’s work. Each change goes feature branch, pull request, CI, development, review gate, staging, human smoke test, second review gate, production. The production cut-over is blue/green with health checks before traffic moves.

Everything that makes a feature supportable ships in the same change as the feature: the in-app help guide, the knowledge the support assistant answers from, and the release note the user sees in the product. Every session ends with a handover, and anything that went wrong twice is written back into the brief of the agent that owns it.

A person sets the direction, approves the plan, smoke tests on staging and approves every promotion. The AI team proposes and executes. It does not decide to ship.

Outcomes

• One system from quote to invoice, replacing spreadsheets, email threads and a desktop program.
• A live view of every job, on the floor, in the office and on the phone.
• Invoices, payments and contacts flow to Xero without being retyped.
• Mobile where the work happens: floor, van and site.
• Multi-tenant SaaS in production, serving several businesses from one codebase.
• Continuous releases, each one reviewed and approved by a person.
• White-label ready for new verticals without a fork.
• Help, support knowledge and release notes always current, because they ship with the code.

Visit blaq-app.com