Charge ERP

Existing Scenario

While the production of crops is increasing, managing them becomes a challenging task. To manage the huge production, a proper inventory management system is required. Inventory management is a crucial part of every business model, especially in mandi business.
 
A close check on inventory can make or break your business. Hence inventory management is significant. The commission agents in mandis deal in various commodities and if they don’t track the inflow and outflow, they will end up selling less or over order.

Let’s understand the benefits of inventory management:

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Business intelligence: Inventory management and planning solutions accordingly help commission agents to gain insights into the fast-selling products. This allows them to adjust their stocks in stores and make quick and smart business decisions.
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Reduce labour costs: Improved inventory planning helps in reducing labour costs incurred in unloading, counting of stock as well as transportation. An intelligent inventory management tool such as mandi accounting software can significantly reduce all these labour-intensive activities.
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Limits employee mishandling: Inventory planning limits employees from using company items for personal use. With inventory control, commission agents can reduce the chances of any theft or pilferage, thereby increasing the profitability of the business by reducing potential ‘hidden’ costs.
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Manage cash flow: A proper inventory management system helps commission agents to manage their cash flow. Due to limited capital, commission agents don’t purchase large amounts of inventory. By having a system in place, they will know the exact amount needed to be invested in inventory and when they need it. This will help in getting ahead in business and also reduce their expenses.
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Maximize profits: As commission agents track their inventory and update it in a timely manner, they will increase their profits. Commission agents can estimate the right commodities to buy based on previous sales figures. They can avoid investing in commodities that don’t have a demand or are obsolete. This makes the general business practices more efficient.

With an effective inventory management system, commission agents can easily track the stock in their stores. They don’t need to overstock or face shortages. They can become one of the key players in the market space with proper mandi accounting software. Also, commission agents need to keep track of payments, do a lot of paperwork and do inventory management. Understanding the concerns of commission agents in mandi accounting and turning them into opportunities, Bijak came up with a solution for mandi accounting called ChargeERP.

The Beginning

First thing first, we started with visiting mandi for field research with two my peer designers and a product manager. Goal was to understand trades and speak to some of our potential customers
Usual day in mandi starts at 4 AM in the morning. Almost for a week our agenda was clear to only focus on below points

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Trade Cycles
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Minimum Viable product (MVP)
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Customers Behaviours
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Market Maturity
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Roles & dependencies
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Scalability

Peer designers with potential customer

Almost after a week with a bag of countless notes, recordings and intervies we were ready to get things started.

Opportunity

Bijak already has presence in 29 States/UT, 1500+ regions covering 90% of India. And currently, it is estimated that there are about 600 to 700 agritech startups in India. These are contributing at different levels in the agri-value chain.

Competitive Benchmarking

There were some existing solutions available in market, Which was used by some of the customers across market. there were two major
By analysing those We had figure out a pattern which customers is acquainted to which has helped us to build our journey maps

Focus Areas

After our field visit and understanding potential market, We got on a round table with our product and stakeholders and came to a careful consideration of some focus areas

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Upcoming double entry based Accounts module need to be in place.
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In order to give the true capability to bank reconciliation, there should be a capability to add, edit, delete transactions right from the reconciliation screen.
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To go the market with bank reconciliation we will need to have the capability to ingest a minimum set of popular bank formats and file types.
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To effectively match transactions between the books of account and the bank statement a robust transaction matching engine has to be in place in order to bring delight to the users
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Multiple scenarios needs to be supported in order to keep reconciliation hygiene, deleting past entries add entries in the reconciled period etc.
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Validation and Inputs from a Chartered Accountant on the accounting implementation.
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Internally the Bank Ledger module for ChargeERP needs to be built first

Persona & User Journey

Creating personas and fictional representations of our target users. This, along with qualitative preliminary research helped us build empathy with the audience, identify exactly what they need from ChargeERP and guide our design decisions from start to end.
We tried to incorporate multiple attributes like the needs, goals, behavioural patterns of our target audience in the user persona.

Mahesh Anand Gupta (Aadhti)

Khandsa Mandi

About

He currently lives in Khandsa. He mainly deals in Onion and Potato. He like to do business with people who he trusts or already have done business with. He likes to play it safe. He has a fear to try new technology but can catch up if taught well.

Pain Points

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With the trades growing, it has become incredibly difficult to keep structure for the procurements, Payments and track their progress
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Upon completion of transaction record verification the reconciliation reports has to be prepared manually each time.
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Simultaneous changes need to be done in the entries when causes of mismatch is ascertained, doing it manually would mean additional time and effort is consumed for making corrections

Goals

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Easy to reconcile
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Saves time, efforts and duplications
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Detecting unaccounted transactions is easier

Considered user stories to be a way of expressing software features as a solution to user needs rather than a requirement document. After our preliminary user research (qualitative - online surveys, telephonic and in-person conversations) we came up with user stories for every single pain point faced by our target audience and mapped them to potential solutions we could come up with.

This helped us narrow down on the feature set (listed below) and build exactly what our target audience needed. We also drafted a few core principles and planned to adhere to it so that we set product vision and mission right.

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Record: Enabling Agri Traders to record their arrivals seamlessly. And enabling traders to log their sales effortlessly
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Settle: Helping traders settle their financials and crate ledgers accurately, save 3-4 hours of manual effort.
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Track: Enabling traders to track their business remotely - anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Conceptualization

We started by creating personas and fictional representations of our target users. This, along with qualitative preliminary research helped us build empathy with the audience, identify exactly what they need from Workspace and guide our design decisions from start to end. We tried to incorporate multiple attributes like the needs, goals, behavioural patterns of our target audience in the user persona.

And many More....

Setting up a layout structure inside a project which can help user navigate and habituate with the product, Also acquaint different devices sizes.

Setup & MVP

We started with making basic version of our design systems and layout to launch it faster and get our validations done.

Most of the components were inspired by React templates, We utilised existing market template.

Adapted our design system in our MVP and we were all set to launch ChargeERPs first version

And many More....

Observations &
Improvements

We started with making basic version of our design systems and layout to launch it faster and get our validations done.

Most of the components were inspired by React templates, We utilised existing market template.

And many More....

Charge ERP - Mandi Accounting Software (SaaS)

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More stories to explore...

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& sipping coffee over call 🥤