The client didn't come to me asking for software. He came to me with a problem: he owns two import firms, and he was running both of them out of the same tangle of spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, and whatever his customs agent happened to email that week.
On paper that sounds manageable. In practice, here's what it actually looked like every month:
- Purchase orders for Firm 1 and Firm 2 lived in separate files, so there was no way to see both businesses at a glance without manually merging sheets
- Bank remittances got logged by hand, and it was genuinely easy to knock off the same payment against two different POs by mistake
- Customs duty (BCD, SWS, IGST) was calculated manually per shipment — one wrong percentage and the landing cost estimate was off, sometimes by a meaningful amount
- Nobody had a clean way to catch it when the bank's AD code and the customs AD code didn't match, until it turned into a compliance headache weeks later
What I actually built
Import Management System isn't a generic ERP with import features bolted on. It's built around the actual lifecycle of an import purchase order: create the PO, track banking and remittance, coordinate with the CHA, calculate customs duty automatically from a product's tax rates, log expenses, track delivery down to remaining quantity, and close the order — with a dashboard that tells you what actually needs attention today, not a wall of data you have to interpret yourself.
The multi-firm part mattered more than I expected going in. Being able to switch between Firm 1, Firm 2, or a combined view — from the same login, without exporting anything — is the single feature that gets used every single day.
Where it stands now
It's in daily use managing both firms' real import operations today. I'm actively extending it — the reporting suite alone has grown to cover landing cost, cost breakup analysis, shipping lead times, supplier history, and CHA performance — and I'm working toward a version other importers running into the same spreadsheet chaos could actually use.
If that sounds like your situation, the product page has a full walkthrough of what's inside, including real screenshots from the system.