An application that follows the item, from donation to shelf

What a spreadsheet cannot hold together

Most reuse organisations keep their figures in a workbook: one tab for donations, one for weights, one for the shop, one for volunteers. Each is accurate the day it is filled in. The problem is not data entry, it is RECONCILIATION: nobody can say, on a Tuesday in February, how many items came in last month, how many are still waiting to be sorted, and how many left through the shop.

Tonnage diverted from landfill is the figure funders and local authorities ask for. It is also the one that is hardest to reconstruct after the fact, because it is the sum of daily actions nobody has time to consolidate.

The flow that is specific to reuse

An item in a reuse centre has a life cycle, not a stock level. It is received — from an individual, a civic amenity site, a collection round — weighed, assigned to a family (furniture, textiles, appliances, books), then sorted: reusable as is, in need of repair, or to be sent on for recycling. Only then does it become a shop item, with a price and a date it went on the shelf.

These successive states are what sets it apart from retail stock: you do not reorder, you receive what arrives. An application that describes this journey gives you what the workbook cannot — how many items are stuck at each stage, and for how long.

• Donations: source, date, weight, item family
• Sorting: direct reuse, repair, or onward recycling
• Shop: price, date placed on the shelf, sale
• Volunteers: shifts, attendance, activity

How the application is produced

You describe what your organisation does, in your own words. A plan is shown to you before anything is built: the entities kept, their fields, the screens, the indicators. You correct it until it matches how you actually work; nothing is built before you approve it.

The result is a standard Next.js and Prisma project. You can download it as a ZIP archive or push it to GitHub: the code is yours, and any developer can pick it up. Three generation levels exist (Sketch, Craft, Masterpiece), depending on whether you are testing an idea or want a finished application.

What the application is NOT

This page describes an internal tracking tool. Several needs of a reuse centre fall outside what the product does, and it is better to know before you start than after:

None of these limits is permanent as far as the code goes — the project is exportable and a developer can extend it — but none is provided out of the box.

• It is not certified point-of-sale software: if your shop is subject to that requirement, payments must stay on your existing till system.
• No connection to scales, barcode scanners or card terminals.
• No electronic filing to a compliance scheme or reporting portal: figures can be read and exported, the return itself stays manual.
• No offline mode: a sorting area without a network connection will not allow live data entry.
• Permissions are global (administrator, user, read-only) — no per-site or per-workshop rights.

Getting the figures out when you are asked for them

The data you enter stays yours and can be retrieved from the Settings screen, as JSON or CSV, one dataset at a time. That is the format that matters when an annual report or a grant application is due: a CSV opens in a spreadsheet, can be cross-checked, and can be attached to a file.

Lists can be filtered and sorted, and a trash bin lets you restore a row deleted by mistake — useful when data entry is shared between volunteers who do not use the tool every day.