Packaging Products - One Portal From Quote to Xero Invoice
Company
Packaging Products (Lower Hutt, Wellington)
Industry
Packaging manufacturing & supplies
Connected Systems
Xero, Shopify, GoSweetSpot
What We Built
- • Quote, job and invoice portal for the production team
- • Pricing engines for five product types
- • Production schedule with a shop-floor TV view
- • Xero, Shopify and courier integrations
Client Overview
Packaging Products supplies packaging to New Zealand businesses and runs its own production work alongside the supply side: custom-made corrugated boxes, printed boxes, labels, name badges and engraving. Each of those is made to order, which means every sale starts with a quote and ends with a job on the factory floor.
The Challenge
The production side was running on a system that was being retired, and quoting made-to-order work is not simple. A custom box price depends on the style, board grade, dimensions, quantity, sheet usage and machine time. Labels depend on substrate, size, finish and run time. The team needed one place to quote all of it accurately, turn accepted quotes into scheduled work, and get the invoice into Xero without typing it twice.
What the team needed:
- Consistent pricing: the same inputs should give the same price, whoever does the quote
- One record per order: quote, job and invoice linked, not rebuilt in three places
- A view of the floor: what is being made this week, what is due, what is outsourced
- Accounts in step: Xero invoices and payments reflected without manual checking
The Solution
Automate AI built a customer service portal for the production team: a React web app on a serverless AWS backend, with staff sign-in, role-based views and an audit trail of who did what. It replaced the old system, and its data migration was built to bring the historical records across.
The heart of it is a set of pricing engines, one per product type. The custom box engine works out how many sheets of board a batch uses, the machine and operator hours, margin and any quantity or wholesale discount. Most of the rates behind it are settings that admins can change in the portal, and we wrote the maths up as a plain-English document so the team could check every formula against their own spreadsheets.
What It Does
Everything from the first quote to the last invoice
Pricing engines per product
Custom boxes, printed boxes, labels, name badges and engraving each have their own pricing logic, driven by settings the team can adjust without a developer.
Quote, job, invoice
A quote becomes a job when the customer accepts it, and a completed job raises the invoice in Xero. Customers can accept a quote online from a secure link.
Production scheduling
A drag-and-drop production board plans work by week, with a shop-floor TV view, product filters and outsourced jobs marked on the board.
Two-way Xero sync
Xero webhooks plus a regular status check keep quotes and invoices in step, with a re-check button for staff on the phone to a customer.
Shopify orders as jobs
Paid orders from the Custom Box online store are pulled in on a schedule and land on the jobs board alongside portal quotes, matched to the right customer.
Freight and dispatch
Freight can be priced at quote time for custom boxes, and courier consignments can be booked and labels printed straight from a job.
Day to Day
How an order moves through the portal
Quote
Staff build a quote with the product calculator, add attachments and notes, and email or print it for the customer.
Accept
The customer accepts online or staff accept on their behalf. Account customers get a draft Xero invoice, cash customers a proforma.
Produce
The job gets production hours, a due date and a slot on the schedule, plus a printable job sheet for the floor.
Invoice
Completing the job finalises the invoice in Xero, and payments flow back into the portal.
Built With the Team, Not Just For Them
The portal has been in continuous development since its first release, shaped by requests from the people who use it every day. Recent work has come straight from the production and labels teams: new label pricing models, previous-order and previous-label libraries for repeat work, rush fees with production due dates, split jobs and packing slips, search across quotes, jobs and invoices, and a flag that stops a quote being accepted for an account that is on stop.
- Pricing is the same every time - quotes come from the engines and settings, not from memory
- Accepted work goes straight onto the schedule - with hours, due dates and a job sheet ready to print
- Online orders join the same queue - Shopify orders appear as jobs without being re-keyed
- Xero stays in step - invoices are raised from completed jobs and payment status flows back
Key Takeaways
- Made-to-order businesses outgrow off-the-shelf tools: the pricing is the business, so it is worth building properly
- Put the rates in settings: the team changes prices and run times themselves, without waiting on a developer
- Connect the systems you already use: Xero and Shopify stay where they are, and the portal joins them up
- Keep shipping small changes: a portal that changes when the team asks keeps getting used
Still quoting from spreadsheets?
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