Two clocks, and nothing connecting them
A florist runs on two clocks at all times. The first belongs to the customer: a ceremony happens on Saturday at eleven, a funeral arrangement has to leave before the service, a birthday is prepared the evening before. Those dates cannot be renegotiated and cannot be missed twice. The second belongs to the goods: cut flowers last a few days, potted plants a few weeks, and a delivery that does not sell ends up on the compost heap.
Nothing joins the two. The order book sits on the counter, incoming stock sits on the wholesaler's delivery notes, corporate subscriptions live in the owner's head, and delivery rounds are worked out on the morning itself. Every piece of information exists, none of them talk to each other, and the junction is exactly what matters: knowing, on a Tuesday morning, what has to be ready by Saturday and what is left in the cold room to make it with.
Why a spreadsheet breaks faster here than elsewhere
A spreadsheet is very good at holding a list. It is not good at warning you. An order written down three weeks ahead never raises its hand on the day it becomes urgent: someone has to remember to open the file, sort the right column and do the arithmetic. On the day the shop is full, nobody opens the file.
Then comes the familiar problem of double entry. An order taken over the phone is written on paper, copied into the spreadsheet in the evening, then written out again on the preparation sheet. Every copy is a chance to lose a date, an address or a quantity. And when two people work the same Saturday, the file opened twice quietly overwrites one person's work.
Existing specialist software, meanwhile, is largely built around online sales and floral relay networks. It handles an order arriving from the internet very well, and the workroom much less so: what has to be made, from what, for when, and what is left afterwards.
What Blueprint Maker builds for you
You describe your business in plain words: what you sell, what you track, what you want to see when you walk in. Blueprint Maker turns that into an application plan — the data kept, the screens, the indicators — and shows it to you BEFORE building anything. You correct that plan until it matches your shop.
Once the plan is approved, the application is generated and published at its own address. This is not a mockup: it is a complete web application with its database, its entry screens and its dashboard. The code can be exported as an archive, so a developer can pick it up later without asking anyone's permission.
- An application plan shown and editable before the build
- A real database, never a disguised spreadsheet
- A web address you open from the shop or from a phone
- Three generation levels: Sketch, Craft, Masterpiece
The deadline banner: the feature that changes the day
This is the single most useful piece for this trade, and it is placed automatically as soon as your orders carry a due date. Above the order list, the application shows a banner summarising the day in one line: how many orders are late, how many are due today, and how many fall within the next seven days.
Below it, the five nearest deadlines are listed by name, sorted by date, each with a button that opens the record directly. If there are more, the banner says so. An order whose status marks it as finished drops out of the banner on its own: you only see what is left to do.
In practice: opening the application on a Tuesday morning, the shop sees at a glance that two bouquets still have to go out today and four ceremonies have to be ready by Sunday — with nothing sorted, nothing filtered and nothing worked out by hand.
The screens you get
Every list in the application arrives with the tools a management tool is expected to have, without your having to ask: a search box, a date-range filter, a status filter, pagination, and a counter telling you how many records match the current filter. The filters you set live in the page address, so the view showing this week's unprepared orders can be bookmarked or sent in a message.
Deliveries and ceremonies can be shown as a calendar rather than a list, with day, week and month views. That is the natural reading of a preparation schedule: you see the busy Saturday three weeks ahead.
Finally, every list exports to CSV — and the export carries exactly the rows on screen, filter included, with the count written on the button itself. The file opens straight into a spreadsheet, separators and accented characters handled, to hand a summary to your accountant or to prepare a wholesale order.
- Deadline banner: late · today · within 7 days
- Delivery calendar in day, week or month view
- Search, date-range filter and status filter on every list
- CSV export of the visible rows, ready for a spreadsheet
- Shareable page address, filters included
The shape the application takes
None of this is imposed: the structure below is what a flower shop commonly ends up with, and you correct it in the plan before the build. A shop with no subscriptions removes that part; a shop doing a lot of event work adds the ceremony venues it keeps going back to.
Start small without throwing it away later
The Sketch level is enough to check in a few minutes that the structure stands up: the right data, the right screens, the right vocabulary. If the plan suits you, the Craft and then Masterpiece levels produce a more finished application on the same foundation.
And because the generated code is standard and exportable, what you build today is not a dead end: if the business grows to the point of needing a till, a payment gateway or an online shop, a developer picks up the existing code instead of starting again.
Entities
- Customers (private and corporate)
- Orders
- Order lines
- Varieties and containers
- Incoming stock
- Subscriptions
- Deliveries
Views
- Dashboard
- Orders to prepare
- Delivery calendar
- Stock and arrivals
- Customers
- Subscriptions
Indicators
- Orders to prepare this week
- Deliveries due today
- Active subscriptions
- Revenue this month
Frequently asked questions
Does the application replace my till?
No. Blueprint Maker generates no point-of-sale software, no card handling and no payment terminal. The application covers management — orders, stock, deliveries, customers — not the counter sale. Your current till stays where it is.
Are the invoices it produces legally compliant?
No. The application can hold an order total and export it, but it does not produce invoices certified against tax regulations. Since the code is exportable and standard, a developer can add that piece on top of what exists.
Can it receive orders from floral relay networks?
No, no connection to those networks is generated. Orders arriving through that channel are entered in the application like any other, and they then benefit from the same deadline banner.
Does the application warn me on its own when an order is coming up?
It displays it, it does not send it. The deadline banner shows what is late, what is due today and what falls within seven days, whenever the screen is opened. There is no automatic text message or email sent to the customer.
How do I track cut flowers, which wilt?
By describing an arrival as a dated entry: date received, variety, quantity, supplier. The application then holds the history and the current state, and a freshness deadline surfaces in the same banner as the orders. It will not, however, guess how long a variety lasts — you enter that yourself.
Can I use it from a phone during a delivery round?
The application is a web application served at an address: it opens in a phone browser just as it does on the shop computer. It is not a native application installed from an app store, and it needs a connection.
What if I describe my business badly?
That is exactly why the application plan is shown to you before the build. You correct it as many times as needed, and you can run a new generation later from a sharper description.