ERP for a solar mounting structure manufacturer — bought by the kilo, cut by the millimetre

Contents

1. Quick answer and quick facts
2. Screenshots
3. The business
4. Who this solar manufacturing ERP is for
5. The challenge
6. Before vs after and task by task
7. Replacing the GST billing app
8. The cutting maths
9. Production costing and wastage
10. Solution architecture
11. The modules
12. Every feature and its purpose
13. Six end-to-end workflows
14. Bank reconciliation, reminders and GST returns
15. Four dashboard layouts
16. AI and automation
17. Roles
18. How it was built
19. What was delivered and client-confirmed results
20. Technology and what can be added next
21. FAQ

What is the best ERP software for a solar mounting structure manufacturer?

A solar mounting structure manufacturer needs an ERP that follows metal, not just invoices: goods receipt by weight, an aluminium cutting model per bar, kg-to-piece conversion, BOM, job work and scrap tracking, production costing, sales orders, GST billing with e-invoice and e-way bill, bank reconciliation, WhatsApp payment reminders and payroll in one system. Yukti AI, a software company in Surat, built exactly this for Beetlory, a Surat maker of solar mounting structures and components whose customers include solar module makers such as Rayzon Solar. Beetlory replaced the 5–6 separate software tools it used before, including the GST billing app GoGSTBill, and now runs sales, production, order tracking and accounting in this one ERP every day.

Quick facts

Who is this solar mounting structure ERP for?

The system was designed around one kind of business: a manufacturer of solar mounting structures and components that buys metal by weight, converts it on cutting, press and threading machines, and sells finished parts by count — while also trading items it does not make. If you run a solar structure fabrication unit, an aluminium profile cutting or extrusion shop, a solar BOS supplier or a vendor to solar EPC companies, the problems on this page will sound familiar. It is also a working answer to the broader search for ERP for the solar industry: inventory software for solar components that understands kilos, metres and pieces at once.

It is a good fit if most of these are true for you:

• You buy aluminium or MS by the kilo but your customers order rails, clamps and nuts by the piece.
• You cut long bars to length and nobody knows exactly how much becomes offcut, kerf chips or rejects.
• Your raw profile and your finished part are two unrelated items in your billing software.
• You bill in a GST billing app, but production, sales orders and costing live in notebooks or Excel.
• You chase payments on WhatsApp and match bank credits to invoices by hand.
• You pay shop-floor staff monthly, daily or by the piece, and run payroll outside the books.

The same design suits other metal-conversion businesses: aluminium extrusion processors, fastener and threaded-rod makers, cable tray and earthing-kit manufacturers, and general sheet-metal and fabrication ERP users. Beetlory is in Surat, and so is Yukti AI; we build these systems for manufacturers across Gujarat and the rest of India.

What a GST billing app could not see in a manufacturing business

These points are our description of the gaps the system was built to close, drawn from a read-only review of the client's billing account and the company profile. They are not quotes from the owner, and the client's own figures are not shown here.

• Production was invisible. The billing app recorded purchases and sales but not what was cut, pressed or threaded in between, so its stock and profit reports could not be relied on.
• Raw and finished items were not linked. A clamp profile bought in kilos and the finished clamp sold in pieces were two separate items with no conversion between them.
• No view of wastage. Offcuts, saw chips and rejects were not measured against any standard, so nobody knew what a finished piece actually cost.
• Rates lived in people's heads. The same item could go out at quite different rates within a few weeks, because there was no agreed customer price list in use.
• Everything looked overdue. Credit invoices carried no payment terms, so the due date was the invoice date and ageing reports were meaningless.
• Masters needed cleaning. Some items appeared twice under slightly different names, and one product family was billed under more than one HSN code.
• The rest of the business ran outside software. Quotations, sales orders, job work, bank matching and payroll were either not in the billing app or not used.

How does a typical day change, task by task?

The table walks through the real jobs in a solar mounting factory and what each looks like in the ERP. The “before” column is a general description of the manual way of working, not a measurement, and no time savings are claimed.

A GoGSTBill alternative for manufacturers — without losing anything it did

Beetlory billed on GoGSTBill, a GST billing app. Before asking anyone to switch, we reviewed their account read-only — pages were opened and read, and nothing was saved, edited, sent or downloaded there — to answer two questions: what do they actually use, and does the new system do all of it?

The answer shaped the build. They mostly used sale invoices, receipts, proformas and purchase bills. Quotations, sale orders, job work, the manufacture feature and price lists were barely used or not used at all. So the ERP had to match the documents they relied on exactly, and then add everything the billing app never covered.

What was matched, feature for feature

• The same GST tax-invoice print — buyer and consignee blocks, state codes and place of supply, line-wise CGST/SGST or IGST, HSN summary, amount in words, bank details, the same four invoice terms and declaration, with Original, Duplicate and Triplicate copies.
• Payment type on the invoice — credit, cash, online or cheque; a paid invoice records and allocates the receipt in the same step, and any excess stays as an advance.
• Transport fields — delivery mode, transporter, vehicle, LR number, PO number and ship-to.
• Proforma to tax invoice — converted once, linked both ways, and blocked from being converted twice.
• Customer price list — agreed rates per customer that pre-fill new quotations, orders and invoices.
• Barcode labels — Code 128 labels on the SKU for A4 sheets and roll printers.
• E-invoice and e-way bill — connected, with checks on every invoice before it goes to the government portals.
• GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B — return sections with offline-tool CSVs and a tie-out to the books, plus a purchase ITC register.
• Profit views — bill-wise, customer-wise and day-wise profit, and gross margin by product.

What was brought across

The company identity and invoice terms, the full product master — every existing item was reviewed, matched to the catalogue, given its HSN code and recent rates, with missing items added — the customer and vendor list, and customer-wise agreed rates. Every matched product keeps its old billing-app name as a searchable alias, so staff can type the name they already know and still find the right item. Phone numbers and contact persons were not copied. Past invoices were not re-keyed; each party’s outstanding is carried in as opening-balance invoices and a physical count becomes opening stock.

What the review found

The review also produced a short list of data issues to fix before go-live: stock figures that could not be trusted because production was never recorded, raw and finished items that were not linked, missing payment terms, duplicate item names, and HSN codes to confirm with the client's CA. The ERP addresses the first four by design — it records production, links raw and finished items through BOMs and conversions, carries payment terms per party and holds one HSN per item — and the HSN question is left with the accountant, where it belongs.

A few things the billing app offers were not part of this build: SMS and email sending, digital signatures and a payment gateway. They are listed openly, not hidden. For the wider question of leaving accounting-only software behind, see Replace Excel & Tally, our guide to moving from Excel and Tally to one system, and how we handle Tally integration with a custom ERP when the accountant still works in Tally.

Under every production order sits a length-based cutting model for aluminium profiles and bars. Each bar is split into five parts that never overlap, so nothing is counted twice:

Pieces per bar are worked out as usable length = bar − end trim and pieces = floor((usable + kerf) ÷ (piece + allowance + kerf)), and a balance check confirms that the five parts add back to the bar length exactly. With the profile's kg per metre, every part also has a weight: finished kilos, kerf chips, trim and remnant.

The calculator in the inventory module shows the same maths for any profile. A worked example built into it: 10 bars of 6,000 mm at 0.80 kg/m, cut to 1,000 mm, gives 60 pieces and 48 kg with 0 mm remaining. The example values are for illustration, not Beetlory’s own settings.

Kg-to-piece conversion: why the weight per metre sits on the product

Each profile stores its own kg per metre and bar length, so a production order can issue “12 bars” and the system knows how many kilos left the raw material store. The same conversion links the raw clamp profile, bought in kilos, to the finished clamp, sold in pieces. Where a profile’s kg per metre has not been configured, the system shows an “unconfigured conversion” warning instead of guessing. Weights per metre, bar lengths and kerf are set per product in the product master, and each specification carries a flag showing where the value came from.

BOM, job work and scrap tracking: where every kilo of aluminium went

A production order moves through release and reservation, bar issue, operations and completion. Routings follow the shop floor: a mono rail goes cut → punch → deburr → inspect → pack, and a railing nut goes cut → drill → tap → deburr → inspect → pack. BOMs carry revisions, cutting parameters and job-work costs, and routings, standard times and wastage percentages are editable.

At completion the operator enters actual good pieces, rejected pieces and weighed scrap. The system then reconciles the weight — input against good output, recoverable scrap, process loss and any unexplained variance — and shows the yield, wastage against the product's standard, and actual cost per piece against standard cost before it receives the finished pieces into stock. Scrap is credited once, at a scrap rate; abnormal loss beyond tolerance is expensed rather than buried in the product cost; and a wastage alert fires when a job goes past its threshold.

Production planning uses the same data: capacity against load by machine type, the bottleneck, a three-week schedule, material shortages, work in progress and planned versus actual. The machine capacities are taken from Beetlory's company profile and are editable, because they are treated as planning figures, not live machine data. Quality control sits alongside — incoming, in-process and final inspections against product checklists, with defect codes and batch traceability; tolerances are configurable per product.

This is the part a billing app cannot do, and the part that answers the owner's real question: what did this order actually cost to make? More on this kind of build on our manufacturing ERP software page, or see how a PP woven-bag plant and a custom gift-box maker track production in their own systems.

The modules

All 17 sidebar entries are working screens on one shared set of books — the scope of a full AI-powered business management system, shaped around a factory.

Dashboard

Twelve KPIs — today's and the month's sales, receivables, payables, bank, cash, inventory, WIP, production, pending dispatch, overdue and gross profit — with charts for sales against purchases, revenue and gross profit, receivables ageing, metal consumption and wastage, plus reorder alerts, production status, supplier payments due, attendance, bank lines awaiting mapping and collections follow-up.

CRM and parties

Customers, suppliers, transporters and job workers, with GSTIN checks and opening balances. Customer 360 puts invoices, payments, orders, quotations, agreed rates, ledger, credit-limit use and WhatsApp history on one page.

Sales, quotations and GST billing

Enquiries, a quotation builder with GST split, freight, terms, revisions and print, tax and proforma invoices, receipts with invoice-wise allocation, credit and debit notes, and the customer price list.

Sales orders

For each line: ordered, reserved, in production, dispatched, invoiced and pending. Stock is reserved, production is raised for shortfalls, dispatch above the order needs an authorised override, and only dispatched quantity is invoiced.

Purchase and suppliers

Requisitions, supplier quote comparison, purchase orders, goods receipt with weighed quantity, rejections, batches and mill test certificates, supplier bills with price and weight variance and landed cost, payments, returns, payables ageing and price history.

Inventory software for solar components

Stock summary, product master with specification source flags and product-specific conversions, stock ledger, batches and traceability, transfers, reasoned adjustments, physical count, scrap yard and scrap sales, reorder report, barcode labels and the cutting and conversion calculator. Negative stock is blocked.

Manufacturing, planning and quality

BOMs with revisions, cutting parameters and job work; production orders with weight reconciliation and actual cost; capacity planning by machine type; incoming, in-process and final inspections.

Dispatch and delivery

Dispatch planning, delivery challans, packing list and DC print, shipping labels, transporter, vehicle and LR, partial delivery, and invoice from challan.

Accounting and finance

Chart of accounts, day book, journals and contra entries that can be reversed but never edited, ledgers, cash and bank book, trial balance, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, GST summary, GSTR-1, GSTR-3B and purchase ITC, ageing and manufacturing costing.

Bank reconciliation, expenses and payroll

Statement import with matching suggestions and rules; expenses with maker–checker approval and input credit; attendance, advances and loans, and a payroll run from draft to paid with printable salary slips.

Reports, WhatsApp centre and settings

About 56 filterable reports with CSV export and print; a WhatsApp centre with 10 message templates and a payment-reminder queue; and settings for company, financial year, numbering, warehouses, units, payment terms, machines, shifts, wastage thresholds and roles.

Every feature of the solar ERP, and what it is for

Everything in this table is built into the system. The right-hand column is the purpose of the feature, not a measured result.

Six end-to-end workflows, step by step

Six walkthroughs show how the modules connect in real cases rather than empty screens.

1. Partial payment across invoices. A customer with several open invoices pays part; the receipt is allocated to the chosen invoices, the “after” balance is previewed, and nothing is marked paid automatically. An unallocated part stays as an identifiable advance.
2. Aluminium cutting. Receive a purchase order for aluminium profile with the weighed quantity and heat and MTC numbers, issue bars to a mono-rail production order, record operations, then complete it with good pieces, rejects and weighed scrap — and see the weight reconciliation, yield, wastage and actual cost per piece.
3. Bank statement mapping. An unmatched bank credit becomes a customer receipt and a reusable matching rule; a statement import then flags overlapping rows as duplicates and suggests the next credit through the saved rule, waiting for review.
4. WhatsApp overdue reminder. The reminder is generated from the invoice's live outstanding and overdue days, edited, previewed and sent; the reminder count and next follow-up are recorded. Disputed invoices are excluded.
5. Payroll. Attendance is corrected with a logged reason, overtime added, and a monthly run shows overtime and an advance recovery; approving books salary payable and marking paid clears it from the bank.
6. Order to cash. Quotation → send on WhatsApp → approve → sales order with the customer's PO → reserve stock → dispatch → invoice dispatched quantity → record payment → review the customer ledger.

Two scripts replay the books and all six workflows to check that they still balance after every change.

Four dashboard layouts, and the one the owner chose

The first review taught us something useful: for this owner, how the system looks matters as much as what it does. A plain admin dashboard would not have been accepted. So the dashboard was rebuilt as four switchable layouts over the same live numbers:

• Command center
• Factory floor — which presents the sales flow from enquiries and quotations to sales orders
• Wall display
• Classic — the original KPI-and-chart dashboard

When the system was opened on the client’s own computer, the owner preferred the Wall display style and liked the typography of the Factory floor view, so the design brings those two together. That is how we like to work: the client reacts to something real, and the design follows the reaction.

What each person gets

Eight roles are defined: Owner, Accountant, Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Production, HR/Payroll and Operator. Restricted modules show a lock in the sidebar, and a permissions matrix lists who can do what. A role switcher shows exactly what each person sees.

• Owner — full access to every module, approvals and settings.
• Accountant — finance, receivables, payables, bank reconciliation, expenses and payroll posting.
• Sales — enquiries, quotations, orders, invoices, collections follow-up and WhatsApp.
• Purchase — requisitions, supplier quotes, purchase orders, goods receipts and supplier follow-up.
• Inventory — stock, warehouses, batches, transfers, physical counts and conversions.
• Production — BOMs, production orders, planning, quality and scrap.
• HR/Payroll — employees, attendance, advances and payroll processing.
• Operator — a shop-floor view limited to production operations and quality entries.

In the client’s words, paraphrased

The outcomes below were confirmed by Paras Trapasiya, owner of Beetlory. They are paraphrased, not quoted, and no numbers have been added to them.

• One system instead of five or six. Before, Beetlory used 5–6 different software tools. Now everything runs in one system.
• Order tracking works properly. Orders can be followed from quotation through production and dispatch to invoice and payment.
• Accounting is in the same system. The books are no longer kept separately from sales, stock and production.
• Data analysis is reliable. Because all the data sits together, the reports and dashboards can be trusted.
• Used daily. Beetlory uses the ERP every day.

Technology

• Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4 — the application.
• shadcn/ui and Lucide icons — the component layer, with Recharts for charts.
• Zustand with immer, persisted to IndexedDB — atomic actions on one shared dataset that survives a browser refresh.
• A pure domain layer — units and conversions, cutting, stock valuation, pricing and GST, double-entry ledger, receivables, production costing and capacity, payroll, bank matching and message templates, written as plain functions separate from the screens.
• PapaParse and an Excel reader — for bank statement and data import.
• Verification scripts — replay the books and the six workflows headlessly.

Inventory is valued at moving weighted-average cost. Depreciation, TDS, multi-currency, bulk import and period closing were outside this build’s scope.

What can be added next

Typical timing for a multi-module ERP like this is a few weeks depending on scope. Costs for builds like this are explained in our custom ERP cost guide, and the general approach on custom ERP software.

Summary