Kitab Ledger

Background

The problem

A bookseller juggles stock, customers who pay in parts, offers on certain titles and day-to-day costs, and rarely knows what the month actually looked like. Customers, meanwhile, have no easy way to see what's in stock, place an order and follow it.

• Orders and questions arrive scattered across chats
• Customers often pay in instalments, which is hard to track by hand
• Offers on selected books are announced by word of mouth
• Expenses and sales live in different places, so profit is a guess
• The owner needs the same data on the phone and at a desk

Solution

What we built

A monorepo with an Expo React Native app for iOS and Android, a React web admin panel, and a shared TypeScript package for the business rules, colours and dates, so both apps behave the same. Both talk to one Supabase backend. Readers get Books, Orders, Deals, Cart and Profile. The shop gets a dashboard, catalogue, order management and a business tools menu.

• Catalogue with authors, genres, publishers, prices, cost and stock
• Cart and orders with stock checks and discounts
• Part payments recorded against an order, with the remaining balance shown
• A message thread on every order between the reader and the shop
• Dated promotions on selected books, announced through notifications
• Push notifications for order updates (tested on Android)
• Expense tracking, plus sales, expense and inventory reports
• Light and dark themes, with dates handled in Pakistan's time zone

Screens

A closer look

Details

Where it stands

• The app runs end to end on a staging backend, with test orders, payments, expenses and Android push verified by hand and in automated checks.
• Before a public launch, checkout is moving to a single server-side transaction, and the backend is being split so several shops can use it separately.
• iOS push delivery is waiting on Apple's notification credentials.