Fishbowl wants a reorder point for a vessel that will never be made again
Custom inventory software for a Whanganui business costs NZ$35,000 to NZ$120,000 and is usually in production within 8 to 18 weeks. The reason off-the-shelf tools fail here is structural: Fishbowl, Cin7 and spreadsheets all assume a SKU with a quantity and a reorder point, and your most valuable stock is a single object that cannot be reordered at any price.
Inventory systems are built around replenishment. They want to know how many you have, how fast they sell and when to buy more. A blown vessel or a thrown and glazed piece answers those questions with one, once and never. So you end up creating a SKU per piece, which turns a product catalogue into a graveyard of dead codes, or you group them, which means the system cheerfully sells a piece that left for a gallery in Wellington last Tuesday.
Raw materials are the opposite problem and equally poorly served. Colour rods, frit, clay bodies and glaze chemicals are consumed by weight against firings, not against units sold. Nothing in a standard system connects the kilograms that went into a kiln with the pieces that came out, which is precisely the number you need to know what a piece actually cost to make.
What inventory management costs in Whanganui
| Project scope | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Serialised piece register with channel availability | NZ$35,000 to NZ$60,000 | 8 to 12 weeks |
| Full system with materials, firings and consignment | NZ$60,000 to NZ$100,000 | 14 to 20 weeks |
| Multi-site with wholesale, packhouse and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) sync | NZ$100,000 to NZ$170,000 | 22 to 32 weeks |
The fix: inventory management built for Whanganui, not rented
The data model is the product. A custom system treats a piece as a serialised object with a lifecycle, made, annealed, finished, photographed, listed, reserved, consigned, sold, and treats materials as a separate consumable ledger drawn down per firing. That gives you a real cost per piece and a real availability answer across every channel. It is a small system built correctly, not a large system configured badly.
- You have refunded a buyer because two channels sold the same physical object
- You cannot state the value of stock sitting on consignment without making phone calls
- Materials cost per piece is unknown, so pricing is instinct rather than arithmetic
- Your product catalogue has more dead SKUs than live ones
- You sell repeatable products with genuine reorder cycles
- Stock lives in one place and one person can see all of it
- Under about 300 items in circulation at a time
- Cin7 Core or Unleashed already fits and your real problem is reporting
The capability list that earns its budget
What we build under inventory management in Whanganui
Everything an inventory management build here can cover: inventory management software, stock control system, barcode scanning, multi-location inventory, inventory tracking and Fishbowl alternative.
How long it takes, phase by phase
Exactly what you get
A system that knows every physical object you own and where it is right now. That means serialised piece records with photography and provenance, a status lifecycle from hot shop through cold shop to sold, a materials ledger drawing down colour rods and glaze chemicals by weight against each firing, consignment locations with commission and ageing, and barcode labelling so a piece can be scanned at the market stall or in the packing area. It becomes the single availability source every sales channel must ask before completing a sale.
How to choose a developer in Whanganui
Ask them to whiteboard the data model in the first meeting. If a piece is a product with a quantity field, walk away. If a piece is a serialised object with a status and a location history, keep talking. Ask how materials connect to output, because that link is what turns inventory software into pricing intelligence. Get initial data entry priced explicitly rather than assumed, since it is two to four weeks of somebody's life. And insist the availability API is documented, because /shopify-development/whanganui-mwt/ and your POS (Point of Sale) will both depend on it.
- Serialised tracking of every unique piece with location, status, photography and provenance
- Materials ledger drawing down colour, frit, clay and glaze by weight against each firing
- True cost per piece combining materials, hot shop hours and firing energy rather than an averaged guess
- Consignment visibility showing what sits at which gallery, aged, with automatic invoicing on reported sale
- One availability source feeding /shopify-development/whanganui-mwt/ and /pos-system-development/whanganui-mwt/ so nothing sells twice
- Somebody must record pieces and materials consistently, and the system is worthless if that discipline lapses
- You lose the supplier catalogues and integrations that come free with Cin7 or Unleashed
- Initial data entry of existing stock and materials is genuinely tedious and usually takes two to four weeks
- If you sell repeatable production items in quantity, Unleashed or Cin7 Core will beat a custom build comfortably
- !They propose a SKU per piece in an existing system. Ask what the catalogue looks like after three years of that.
- !No question about raw materials. Ask how they would calculate cost per piece from a firing.
- !Consignment treated as a customer type. Ask how stock remains yours while sitting in someone else's gallery.
- !Barcode hardware left out of scope. Ask which label printers and scanners they have deployed before.
- !No plan for initial data entry. Ask who does it, how long it takes and what it costs.
Most Whanganui teams pricing inventory management end up comparing notes on accounting, project management, lms too; the systems share one data spine. Weighing options across the region? We publish the same inventory management guide for Palmerston North. Prefer to talk to the team that builds these? Digital Heroes handles custom software development end to end.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- McKinsey estimates that digitizing the supply chain (Supply Chain 4.0) can cut lost sales by up to 75%, reduce inventories by up to 75%, and lower supply chain operational costs by up to 30%, with up to 30% lower transport and warehousing costs. Source: McKinsey & Company (2016) →
- In a survey of 113 supply chain leaders (conducted late March to mid-April 2022), 67% had implemented digital dashboards for end-to-end visibility, and those companies were about twice as likely as others to avoid supply chain problems during the disruptions of early 2022; 71% expected to revise inventory policies going forward. Source: McKinsey & Company (2022) →
- The median annual wage for U.S. software developers was $133,080 in May 2024, and employment is projected to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034 - a core input to any in-house build-vs-buy TCO model. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024) →
- Median SaaS spend reached $9,455 per employee, and organizations leave an average of 36% of their SaaS licenses unused. Source: Zylo (2026) →
Eliza is a brand designer at Digital Heroes, producing the identity work that sits around a product: logos, type, color systems and the guidelines that keep it all consistent once other people start applying it. Her posts are for readers who need brand and product to look like the same company.
View profile · Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
What does inventory software cost for a Whanganui glass or ceramics studio?
A serialised piece register with channel availability runs NZ$35,000 to NZ$60,000 over 8 to 12 weeks. Adding a materials ledger, firing batches and consignment takes it to NZ$60,000 to NZ$100,000. Below about NZ$35,000 you cannot build serialisation and channel sync properly, and a half built version is worse than none.
Why can Cin7 or Unleashed not handle one-off pieces?
Both are excellent at replenishment inventory, which assumes reorder points, supplier lead times and quantities above one. Unique pieces have none of those, so you end up with a SKU per object and a catalogue that becomes unusable. Both are New Zealand built and worth using when you sell repeatable stock.
How do we track pieces sitting on consignment at galleries?
Consignment becomes a location type, so the piece stays on your books while physically elsewhere, with the gallery's commission rate attached. The system ages the stock, prompts you to rotate anything past 90 days, and raises the invoice only when a sale is reported. This is usually the fastest payback in the whole build.
Can it tell us what a piece actually cost to make?
Yes, if the materials ledger and firing batches are in scope. Colour, frit and glaze consumed by weight, plus hot shop hours and firing energy, divided across the pieces that survived annealing, gives a real cost rather than a feeling. It usually changes pricing decisions within the first month of accurate data.
Does this connect to Shopify and our market stall till?
It must, otherwise you have simply added a fourth disagreeing system. The register becomes the availability source and every channel asks it before completing a sale, with reservations handling the moments when two buyers arrive at once. Scope the inventory system and the POS work together rather than six months apart.
How long does it take to load our existing stock?
Two to four weeks of real effort for a working studio, including photographing and measuring pieces that were never properly recorded. Price this explicitly rather than discovering it, and consider hiring a part-time person for the load rather than taking your maker off the floor.
Will it handle a market garden's produce as well?
Different model, same system if scoped that way. Produce needs harvest lots, grades, packing dates and shelf life rather than serialisation, and traceability back to a crop block for food safety. Combining both disciplines adds roughly NZ$25,000 to NZ$40,000 over a single discipline build.
What ongoing costs should we expect?
Budget NZ$800 to NZ$2,500 a month covering hosting, backups, monitoring, security updates and channel API maintenance. Inventory systems touch more third party services than most internal tools, and those services change their APIs without consulting you.
Do we own the code and the data?
Yes, and make it explicit before work starts. Repository under your organisation, database credentials in your name, and a tested full export including images. Your piece register becomes an archive of everything you have ever made, which has value well beyond the software itself.
How secure is a custom inventory system, and what about compliance like lot traceability?
Who owns the code when an agency builds my inventory system?
Who owns the code when an agency builds my software?
Will a custom system keep up if we grow to more SKUs, orders, and warehouses?
What are the most common mistakes companies make on inventory software projects?
How many people should be working on my software project?
We already use Fishbowl. When does replacing it with custom software make sense?
Who can build custom inventory management software for a business in Whanganui?
Digital Heroes builds custom inventory management software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, so an operator in Whanganui gets an assigned senior team rather than a local account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other inventory management software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
