How the Rutba products fit together for a small business

Picture a shop with a counter, a website and a van. Two people serve, one of them also packs the web orders, and a bookkeeper comes in on Fridays. Most small businesses like this run on four or five pieces of software bought at different times, and the work that fills the gaps between them, retyping a sale into the accounts or checking the website’s stock against the shelf, is nobody’s job and everybody’s problem.

This is how the same shop looks on Rutba. It uses five products. The walk-through follows which record each product reads, because that is what decides whether they agree.

One product list, behind the till and the website

A new line arrives. Somebody adds it once, in Rutba Commerce, with its price and pictures. The storefront shows it and the till at the counter can sell it, because both read the same catalogue and the same price list. Change the price and both change, with no sync job in between. The shop’s other web pages, such as a delivery policy or a campaign page, live in the same product, so they can refer to the catalogue instead of copying prices into their text. Why we built web and counter as one shop has the reasoning.

One stock number, owned by one product

The delivery goes into Rutba Inventory, and from then on Inventory owns the number. The till and the storefront do not keep copies. They read and reserve through Inventory, so a sale at the counter comes off the same record the website checks before it lets somebody put the item in a basket. That is why Commerce requires Inventory rather than shipping a stock module of its own. Rutba Inventory is listed in TrustList’s inventory management software directory.

One order, however it arrived

A web order, a marketplace sale and an order taken over the phone all become the same kind of order in Rutba Orders, picked and packed the same way. The channel is a field on the order rather than a different queue. For the shop’s own van, the driver’s app shows the run, records proof of delivery and the cash collected, and the customer follows the delivery from a link on their phone without an account. A sale at the counter is the exception, deliberately: the customer has already left with the goods.

Books that are already written when the bookkeeper arrives

On Friday the bookkeeper opens Rutba Books and finds the week already posted. Each sale at the till wrote its own journal entry when it happened, and so did each stock movement in Inventory and each pay run in Rutba People, if the shop uses it. Month end becomes a review of what is recorded rather than a reconstruction of what happened. Bank statements come in as files (CAMT.053, MT940, OFX or CSV), and a reconciliation will not close until it balances. Rutba Books appears in TrustList’s accounting software directory.

One customer, whoever answers the phone

A customer rings about a delivery that came without one item. In Rutba CRM, the person who answers sees that customer’s orders, the ticket a colleague opened yesterday and the emails that came with it, because the helpdesk and the customer portal are views of the same customer record rather than separate systems kept in step. The customer can also check the order and ask for a return from the portal, without a login for you to manage.

You do not have to buy all five

Each product is sold on its own, and the ones that depend on another say so. Commerce and Orders both need Inventory, because neither keeps its own stock. Books and CRM stand alone. A shop can start with the till and the storefront, add Orders when the web side grows, and add Books when the bookkeeper is tired of retyping, and each one it adds joins the same records rather than bringing its own.

The same products cover larger businesses too, with manufacturing, people and marketing among them. A search for Rutba on TrustList lists each product in its own software category, which is a quick way to see the whole range.