Ten films of the Rutba Suite at work, each run by an invented business

A product page can say that the till and the website share one catalogue. A film can show a price changed in one place and charged in the other. So each product in the Rutba Suite’s “Run the business” shelf now has a film of three to five minutes, set in a business that needs it, and each film has a post here that follows it step by step.

The ten films

• Commerce: a corner shop’s website, catalogue and till, at Larkspur Corner Store.
• Inventory: a warehouse from goods in to buying again, at Northbank Trading.
• Orders: a takeaway’s order from the board to the door, at Saffron Lane.
• CRM: leads, calls and a late delivery on one record, at Northbank Trading.
• People: the time clock, the pay run and the hiring board, at Wrenmoor Garden Centre.
• Books: an invoice paid and the year so far, at Northbank Trading.
• Facilities: a workshop’s assets and a lapsed contractor, at Granite and Grain.
• Fleet: the lorry the wrong licence cannot take, at Kilnside Builders.
• Manufacturing: a walnut table released to the floor, at Granite and Grain.
• Sign: understand the paper, then draft it for the place, on the public Rutba Sign site.

Play the film

The first of the ten: Rutba Commerce at Larkspur Corner Store (3:37).

Why invented businesses

Software films usually show an empty account, or a real customer’s data with names blurred. Neither shows what the product is for. Each of these businesses was made up with a year of trading behind it: Northbank Trading has customers who pay late and a supplier who cancels an order, Kilnside Builders has a driver whose licence has expired and a tipper whose insurance has lapsed. The films were shot on copies of the apps loaded with those made-up records, so no real customer, employee or figure appears in any of them.

Several businesses appear more than once. Northbank Trading’s stock, customers and books are one set of records across three films, and Granite and Grain’s workshop machines turn up in both Facilities and Manufacturing, which is the point of a suite: the apps share a record rather than an export, as an earlier post on how the modules fit together explains.

What a film may show

Every script was checked against the apps before shooting, and a step the app could not do was cut rather than faked. Where a film found a fault, it went to the people who own that app to be fixed, rather than being hidden on camera. Each film is on its product’s page and on the Rutba YouTube channel.