The Challenge
Best Before It's Gone sources short-dated and past-best-before food and drink from retailers including Costco and Amazon. Stock arrives as mixed pallets — sometimes with supplier paperwork, often without. Either way, it needs to be processed quickly.
Margins in this business are tight by nature. Any delay in getting stock logged, booked in, and passed to the listings team represents a direct hit on profitability. The management team were clear: the booking-in process needed to be faster, more accurate, and fully traceable.
Seven specific requirements shaped the brief:
- Session management — log the operative, supplier, and manifest number (where available) at the start of each session
- Check existing stock across both the warehouse system and ecommerce platforms, and book in against existing lines with best-before dates
- Create new SKUs on the fly for stock not yet in the system, then book in immediately
- Log every booking in Airtable against operative, supplier, and manifest for management review
- Add new items to a listings to-do list in Airtable automatically
- Generate EAN-13 barcodes for products that arrive without one
- Handle damaged stock — flag it and create a 'D'-suffixed SKU to keep it separate
What We Built
A warehouse booking-in web app — designed for speed, built around the reality of how mixed pallet stock actually arrives.
Operatives start a session by logging their name, supplier, and manifest number if available. From there, every scan is tracked against that session — giving management a full record of who booked in what, when, and under which delivery.
How It Works
Scanning a product triggers a live check against Mintsoft (the WMS) and BigCommerce (the ecommerce platform), returning current stock levels across all active channels.
If the product already exists: The operative selects the line and books stock in immediately via the Mintsoft API, capturing the best-before date at the point of entry. No re-keying of product details.
If the product is new: A minimal setup form captures the essentials — name, barcode, cost price, selling price, VAT code — and an SKU is auto-generated. A single API call creates the product in Mintsoft; a second call books the stock in immediately. The item is also added to the Airtable to-do list for the listings team.
No barcode on the product: The app generates a new EAN-13 barcode on demand, assigns it to the new SKU, and produces a printable label.
Damaged stock: The operative flags the item as damaged. The app creates a new 'D'-suffixed SKU in Mintsoft — keeping damaged lines cleanly separated from sellable stock without disrupting the main record.
Throughout, every booking is written to the 'Book In Record' in Airtable via API — linked to the operative, supplier, and manifest — giving management a live, searchable audit trail of warehouse activity.
The Outcome
Booking-in time per line dropped significantly. Operatives can work through a mixed pallet in a single session without leaving the app — whether stock is familiar or brand new, the process is the same: scan, confirm or enter, done.
The Airtable integration means management can review booking-in activity in real time, spot bottlenecks, and hold sessions accountable. The listings team receive a clean to-do list automatically, without relying on manual handovers.
What We Learned
In high-volume, low-margin businesses, the cost of friction in operational processes is often invisible until you quantify it. Saving two minutes per line across hundreds of lines a day adds up fast — and that's before accounting for the errors that manual data entry introduces.
Building around the actual workflow — mixed pallets, missing paperwork, damaged stock — rather than an idealised process made the difference. The app handles the messy reality, not just the clean version.
Visit Best Before It's Gone: cheapfood.co.uk
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