A potato cold storage is a bigger operation than it looks. Trucks arrive at the gate, thousands of sacks are received and placed, customers come back months later, rent is invoiced, staff are paid, and the machinery has to keep running through all of it. Much of this traditionally lives on paper and in people’s memories. RBCS brings it together in one place.

What it covers

  • Receiving: gate entry and storage receipts as sacks come in.
  • Storage: allocating and rotating stock across pockets, with the space available always visible.
  • Delivery: delivery orders and gate passes as stock goes out.
  • Money: rent invoicing, payments, cheques, accounts and finance closing.
  • People: HR, payroll, staff tasks and an internal messenger.
  • Operations: procurement, quality, engineering, energy and analytics.
Illustration of the workflow from gate to invoice, a grid of storage pockets and a list of activity
An illustration of how the work flows, in the system’s colours. This is not a real screen and shows no real data: RBCS holds a private business’s records, so there are no screenshots here.

The rules that matter

When a system holds someone’s stock and money, trust is the feature. So a few rules are not negotiable. Stock comes only from an append-only ledger of signed movements. Corrections are added rather than written over, so history cannot quietly change. Every change has a permission check and an audit record. An estimated weight is never treated as an actual one.

I wrote more about these lessons in the journal: What a cold storage taught me about software.

Designed for the people using it

The interface works in Bangla and English, using the actual terms of the trade rather than literal translations. Quantities and dates follow the language you are working in. Storekeeper screens put the pocket number and free space first, and on a phone, long tables become simple cards with large touch targets. A screen that looks good on a laptop is no use to someone standing in a cold hall with one free hand.

How it is built

RBCS uses plain PHP, MySQL, server-rendered pages and a little vanilla JavaScript, with no framework and no build step. That was a deliberate choice. It has to run for years on ordinary shared hosting, and be easy to keep alive long after the excitement of building it has passed.

Where it stands

The planned modules are complete and the system is online, with real paper records being brought in and checked. Where the old records are incomplete, the system says so rather than guessing. RBCS is a private system for the business that runs it, so there is no public demo. The screens are being redesigned next.