Bilawal Electronics ERP: Sales, Stock, and Installments on Laravel

A consumer electronics retailer outgrowing its spreadsheets

Bilawal Group of Electronics is a consumer electronics retailer in Pakistan. Its catalog covers the categories that typically sell on credit in that market — smartphones, laptops, home appliances, and office equipment — and a large share of sales close on monthly installment plans rather than cash. Installment selling builds a loyal, repeat customer base, but it also means every sale opens a receivable that has to be tracked, collected, and reconciled for months afterwards.

When CEO Bilawal Azam brought the project to Sigi, the company was trading from multiple branches, each with its own sheets for head office to reconcile. The brief was a complete ERP that could manage sales, purchases, stock movements, installments, and customer records in one place, automate the workflow, and improve accuracy as the retail operation grew.

Why installment retail breaks manual bookkeeping

An electronics shop selling for cash can get by on a stock register and a sales book. Add installment plans and the same shop is also running a lending book: each sale spawns a payment schedule, each schedule needs a monthly collection, and every missed payment becomes an overdue account someone has to chase. Bilawal Group was carrying that load by hand, and the same problems kept recurring.

• Stock drift between branches — stock in, stock out, and purchase orders lived in separate sheets, so branch counts and head-office totals disagreed and had to be reconciled manually.
• Collections without a system — monthly dues, partial payments, and overdue balances for thousands of customers were tracked by hand, which delayed follow-ups and made the receivables figure unreliable.
• Double entry into the books — every sale, purchase, and payment was written once for operations and again for bookkeeping, so finance lagged the shop floor and errors compounded.
• Identity at scale — with thousands of customer records and multi-month credit relationships, confirming who was paying on which account depended on paperwork rather than a verified identity.

Custom ERP architecture: Laravel, MySQL, and a biometric layer

Sigi built the ERP as a web application on Laravel and PHP 8, backed by MySQL. The choice fits the workload: a retail ERP with installment ledgers is dominated by relational data — customers, plans, schedules, stock movements, ledger entries — so the schema, not a feature list, is where the build started. Keeping that model in one Laravel codebase is what makes the ERP maintainable for a small in-house team, a recurring requirement in our custom software development engagements.

Three design decisions shaped the system:

1. One ledger, many views. Sales, purchasing, stock, and installments write to shared tables, and bookkeeping reads from them. A transaction is entered once; nothing is re-keyed into a separate finance tool.
2. Branch as a first-class dimension. Every stock movement, sale, and collection carries a branch, so head office sees consolidated inventory and receivables while each location manages its own counts and dues.
3. Biometric identity on the customer record. DigitalPersona fingerprint hardware is integrated through the API layer so customers can be verified against their record rather than a paper file.

Why a custom ERP instead of an off-the-shelf package

Packaged ERPs model credit sales as invoices with payment terms, not as multi-month installment plans with per-customer schedules, markups — the amount added over the cash price when a customer pays in installments — overdue handling, and branch-level collection. Because installment selling is the core of how Bilawal Group trades, the schema was designed around its plan structures first. That ordering is what made bookkeeping automation possible instead of bolted on.

The stack we built it on

The ERP is a Laravel (PHP 8) application on MySQL, with a Bootstrap 5 interface and a REST API layer that carries the DigitalPersona biometric integration. Laravel’s ORM, migrations, queues and scheduler run the parts an installment business leans on every day — due-date runs, overdue flags and automated payment reminders — while MySQL holds the relational core of customers, plans, schedules, stock movements and ledger entries. It is a deliberately lean, maintainable stack that a small in-house team can keep running long after launch.

How the platform is built and run

For an installment retailer the ERP is a system of record first, so it is engineered around one shared ledger, branch-level accuracy, and verified customer identity:

• One ledger, many views: sales, purchasing, stock and installments write to shared tables and bookkeeping reads from them, so a transaction is entered once and never re-keyed into a separate finance tool.
• Branch as a first-class dimension: every stock movement, sale and collection carries a branch, so head office sees consolidated inventory and receivables while each location manages its own counts and dues.
• Installment ledgers run on Laravel’s ORM, migrations, queues and scheduler, so due-date runs, overdue flags and automated payment reminders fire on schedule rather than by hand.
• Biometric identity on the customer record: DigitalPersona fingerprint hardware is integrated through the REST API layer so a customer is verified against their record at the counter.
• Automatic bookkeeping: sales, purchases, stock adjustments and installment receipts post to the ledger themselves, feeding receivables, cash and markup reports that reconcile to what the branches recorded.
• A deliberately lean, maintainable stack — Laravel (PHP 8) on MySQL with a Bootstrap 5 interface — that a small in-house team can keep running long after launch.
• Process-first delivery: the build started from the client’s existing sheets and books, and modules shipped in the order the business depended on them — stock and sales, then installments and collections, then finance and dashboards.

What we implemented: sales, stock, installments, and finance

Sigi designed, built and shipped the ERP end to end. Here is what we implemented across its modules.

Sales, purchasing, and stock across branches

• Sales entry that draws down branch stock and creates the customer’s installment plan in the same transaction
• Purchase orders and goods-received flows that record stock in, with supplier and cost data feeding markup reporting
• Per-branch stock in/out ledger with consolidated inventory across all branches for head office
• Product catalog spanning mobile phones, laptops, home appliances, and office essentials

Installment management and collections

• Per-sale payment schedules with monthly due dates, running balance, and full payment history
• Collection screens for recording monthly payments, partial payments, and early settlements
• Overdue tracking that surfaces late accounts so collectors know who to contact first
• Automated notifications ahead of due dates and on missed payments, which shortened collection cycles
• Customer records that carry plan history, so repeat buyers are assessed on how they paid last time

Customer verification with DigitalPersona biometrics

Installment retail is a trust business, and across thousands of open accounts a signature on a form is not enough. The ERP integrates DigitalPersona fingerprint readers so a customer’s record can be tied to a verified identity and checked at the counter. For the retailer this closes off account confusion and impersonation; for the customer it means a repeat purchase pulls up the right plan history immediately.

Bookkeeping, finance, and BI dashboards

• Automatic ledger postings from sales, purchases, stock adjustments, and installment receipts
• Receivables and cash reports that reconcile to what the branches actually recorded
• Business intelligence dashboards with real-time views of inventory position, payment collection, and markups
• Reporting that head office and branch staff can read without exporting to spreadsheets

Delivery: mapping real processes before writing code

The build started with the client’s existing sheets and books rather than a feature list. Sigi’s team traced how a sale becomes a plan, how a plan becomes monthly collections, and how each of those lands in the accounts, then modeled the ERP around that flow. Bilawal Group is not a software business, so Sigi kept every step simple and clear and customized the system to match their exact business processes. Modules were delivered in the order the business depended on them: stock and sales first, then installments and collections, then finance and dashboards.

The natural next layer, now that the operational data is consistent across branches, is deeper ERP analytics — the direction the platform is set up to grow in.

The team and expertise behind the build

The ERP was delivered end to end by one cross-functional Sigi team — product strategists, UI/UX designers, full-stack engineers and QA — working as a single unit rather than handing the build between vendors. Sigi hires only specialists: every engineer is an expert in their own field, and we invest in the team as they deliver, supporting certifications and continuous learning so expert, motivated engineers stay on every build. It is the model we have run since 2016: deep, cross-industry expertise owning the whole stack, from the Laravel and MySQL backend and the installment ledgers to the DigitalPersona biometric integration. Modeling a real installment business in software and automating the bookkeeping behind it is exactly the kind of domain-led engineering our team is built for — the same capability behind our custom software and web application development work.

Results: 70% less manual bookkeeping

With sales, purchasing, stock, installments, and finance sharing one set of records, the double-entry work that consumed the back office largely disappeared: collection is faster, reconciliation is more accurate, and manual bookkeeping dropped by 70%. Head office now has centralized control of stock, sales, and customer data across branches instead of a stack of branch spreadsheets to merge.

“The Sigi Technologies team made everything simple and clear, even for someone not very technical. They guided us through every step, from planning to implementation.”

Related retail and operations builds

Custom ERP development for retail sits alongside other back-office and inventory systems Sigi has shipped. The Busy Bean coffee platform pairs a subscription storefront with a multi-role admin, the Kwik eMart grocery platform handles catalog and order operations for a retailer, and the 3D Logistix warehouse platform tackles multi-tenant stock control at warehouse scale.

If your retail or trading business is running installments, stock, and accounts on spreadsheets, Sigi can scope a Laravel ERP around your actual workflow. See our web application development and e-commerce and retail work, or contact Sigi to talk through the modules you need first.