CredFlow: Stock and Credit Management SaaS for FMCG Distributors in Pakistan
Duration
About 1 month
Year
2026
My Role
Sole engineer for PureMatrix Data Solutions: product design, the marketing site, the distributor web app, the admin panel and the Firebase backend
At a glance
- roughly, from start to launch
- 1 month
- parts: marketing site, distributor app, admin panel
- 3
- free trial before a plan
- 14 days
- payment methods, incl. JazzCash and EasyPaisa
- 6
Technologies Used
The Challenge
FMCG distribution in Pakistan runs on credit. A distributor delivers beverages, biscuits or confectionery to hundreds of shops, most of them pay later, and recovery is a monthly fight. The usual tools are Excel files that drift out of sync with the warehouse, paper invoices, and a rough sense of who owes what. ERPs exist, but they are expensive, complex and not built around how local distributors actually work. PureMatrix wanted a focused product for that market: stock, invoices, retailer credit and recovery in one place, priced in rupees, paid for with the wallets distributors already use, and simple enough to replace a spreadsheet on day one.
The Solution
The distributor app
- Inventory. Products with SKU, purchase and sale price, opening stock and a low-stock threshold. Stock is adjusted in and out with checks, so you can't remove more than you have. Each product shows as in stock, low or out.
- Invoices. Pick a shop, add line items and discounts, and create the invoice. Creating it deducts the stock and posts the amount to that shop's ledger in one step. Pending invoices can still be edited; delivered ones can't. Invoices print or save as PDF and export to Excel.
- Retailer ledger and credit. Every shop has a credit limit, an outstanding balance and a payment history. Payments are recorded as cash, cheque, bank transfer or online. Balances fall into aging buckets (0–7, 8–15, 16–30 and 30+ days), and shops over their limit or overdue are flagged. A shop with invoice or payment history can't be deleted, so the books stay intact.
- Daily expenses. Expenses by category, payment method and route or salesman, with a 30-day daily average and Excel export.
- Owner dashboard. Today's sales, total receivables, stock value, top debtors and stock status in one view, plus a daily Excel report of sales, stock and receivables in PKR.
- Accounts. Email sign-up for a business workspace, password reset, verified email changes, re-authentication for sensitive actions, and account deletion from inside the app.
Subscriptions built for the local market
Every workspace starts with a 14-day free trial. When the trial ends without a plan, the app stays readable but actions like creating invoices or recording payments are disabled with a clear message, so no data is lost and the upgrade path is obvious. There are three plans: Starter (PKR 3,000 a month), Growth (PKR 5,000 a month) and a custom Enterprise tier. Card payments aren't the default for distributors, so the pricing page also offers JazzCash, EasyPaisa, NayaPay, SadaPay and bank transfer.
The admin panel
PureMatrix runs the business from a separate admin area: every organization with its plan, status and last activity (with the option to suspend one), subscriptions, total revenue, MRR by plan, failed payments, and alerts for churn risk, low usage and overdue payments.
The marketing site
The public site explains the product in distributors' own terms: credit, recovery, stock that goes out of sync, messy Excel. It has a landing page, separate pages for distribution management and FMCG distribution software searches, an about page, a blog, legal pages and a light and dark theme. Demo and support requests open WhatsApp with a pre-filled message, because that's where distributors in Pakistan already do business.
Decisions & Trade-offs
- One invoice, three updates. Creating an invoice changes stock, the shop's ledger and the dashboard together, so the numbers never disagree the way separate spreadsheets do.
- Read-only, not locked out, after the trial. Distributors keep access to their data when a trial ends; only new actions wait for a plan. That protects their records and makes upgrading the obvious next step.
- Local payment methods first. JazzCash, EasyPaisa, NayaPay, SadaPay and bank transfer sit next to cards, because that's how distributors actually pay.
- Excel export everywhere. Invoices, expenses and daily reports export to Excel, so moving off spreadsheets doesn't mean giving them up.
- Aging buckets over raw totals. Splitting outstanding balances by how long they've been due tells a distributor who to call today, which a single total can't.
- Firebase over a custom backend. Auth and Firestore gave multi-tenant workspaces and an admin view without servers to run, which is what made a one-month build realistic.
Results
- Live at credflow.app, with sign-up, a 14-day trial and three subscription plans.
- One React codebase serves the marketing pages, the distributor app and the admin panel, with screens loaded on demand so public pages stay light.
- Shipped in about a month, from February 2026.
Impact
CredFlow is a reminder that a good SaaS for a local market is mostly about fit, not features. It talks about recovery instead of "accounts receivable", prices in rupees, takes payment through mobile wallets, and keeps a distributor's books safe even when a trial runs out.