From phone calls to a platform: automating a metal-broking business end to end

The situation

Metal broking, as this client had practised it for years, was a business conducted entirely by voice. Sellers called with material and an asking price. Buyers called with requirements and a bid. The broker sat between them — matching, negotiating, confirming transport, and, once the deal closed, working out his commission and raising an invoice by hand. Every price lived in his head or a notebook; every order existed as a sequence of calls.

It worked because he was good at it. It also meant the business was exactly as large as the number of calls one person could take in a day, and it stopped entirely when he stepped away from the phone.

What we built

We treated the brokerage as a process rather than a personality, and built the system around the process:

• An order book. Bids and asks entered once — by the client’s team or by the counterparties themselves — against material, grade, quantity, location and price, with a live view of what was on offer and what was wanted.
• Matching and confirmation. Orders matched against the book with the broker’s margin applied, and confirmations issued to both sides from the system rather than by callback.
• Transport as part of the order. Dispatch details, vehicle and delivery confirmation attached to the order record, so the movement of goods and the movement of money were reconciled in one place.
• Commission invoicing from the record. Once a matched order was marked delivered, the commission invoice was generated from the order data — the right parties, the right quantity, the agreed rate — and sent, with the accounting entry posted alongside.

What changed

The phone did not disappear, but it stopped being the system of record. Counterparties could see the book; matches did not depend on the broker remembering who had called that morning; invoices no longer waited for a quiet evening to be written up. The hours that had gone into relaying prices went instead into the parts of the business only he could do — sourcing, relationships, and margin.

The larger change was structural. A brokerage built on one person’s phone is not a business that can be scaled, delegated, or sold. One built on an order book and a process can be all three.

Why a CA firm built this

Because the hard part was not the software. It was knowing which fields on an order become the commission invoice, which become the GST liability, and which the transport cost — and designing the record so that accounting fell out of operations instead of being reconstructed from it afterwards. That is the same discipline we apply in every automation engagement and every Virtual CFO retainer: build the process so the numbers are a by-product, not a project.