Built for the person standing at the shelf

The problem is not counting

Almost every organisation with a store room has tried to fix it before. There is a spreadsheet, and it was accurate for about three months. There is a book by the door that people sign when they remember. There may even be a proper system, bought at some expense, which the storekeeper maintains by hand because nobody on the shop floor will use it.

The counting is not the hard part. The hard part is that taking something has to cost the person taking it approximately nothing, or they will not do it — and everything downstream, every balance and every report and every audit, depends entirely on whether they did.

So we started at the terminal

Scan a badge. Scan the item. Confirm. Under eight seconds, on a £30 reader and whatever tablet was going spare, with gloves on and in bad light. No login, no menus, no training, no app to install. If that interaction is not faster than not doing it, nothing else we build matters.

Everything else — the ledger, the reports, the reorder points, the calibration dates — exists because that one interaction happened reliably.

Two problems, one system

Stores hold two different kinds of thing, and most software only understands one. There are consumables, where the question is how many are left. And there is equipment, where the question is who has it. Organisations end up with a stock system and a separate tool register and a spreadsheet bridging them.

Nilstock handles both, and the person at the terminal never has to say which is which — the barcode already knows.

The ledger is the point

Movements are append-only. Corrections are new entries, never edits, so the record of a mistake survives next to its fix. It makes some things harder to build and it is non-negotiable, because the moment a balance is a number someone could have quietly changed, it stops being evidence and becomes an opinion.

Where we are

Early, and honest about it. The engines are built and heavily tested. We are signing our first customers now, and we would rather work closely with a few and get it right than collect logos. If you run a controlled store and something here sounds like your week, tell us about it — early customers shape what gets built next, and that is not a marketing line at this size.