Almacén-Pro Case Study: Goods Receiving with PDF Parsing and EAN Scanning

When a truck unloads at a supermarket, the real work is not moving boxes. It is proving what arrived and what didn't. Every supermarket, pharmacy and retail store receives goods every single day, and most of them still do it the same way, a paper delivery note, a pen, and someone counting by eye. Almacén-Pro, the platform we built for StocNova Technology, replaces that ritual with a process that takes seconds, misses nothing, and leaves proof you can claim money back with.

Paper Is Costing You Money

Here is what goods receiving looks like in most retail operations today. A delivery arrives with a delivery note that can run several pages. Someone ticks lines off with a pen while unloading, quantities get counted by eye, and the sheet ends up in a drawer. If three units were missing from a box, nobody notices today. They notice days later, when the supplier invoice doesn't match the stock on the shelves.

And by then it is too late. There is no record of who received the delivery, no evidence of what was actually in the boxes, and the claim against the supplier turns into word against word. Multiply that by every delivery, every week, every store, and missing merchandise quietly becomes a cost of doing business. It isn't. It is money you are entitled to claim back, if you can prove it.

That is the process Almacén-Pro was built to fix, the daily reception ritual of supermarkets, pharmacies, drugstores and any retail business that receives goods against a delivery note.

Reception Without Paper, Discrepancies Without Debate

Almacén-Pro is a web platform (PWA) where reception starts with the supplier's PDF and ends in a verified, auditable record. The operator uploads the delivery note, a custom parsing engine extracts every product line with its expected units, and reception is verified by scanning each product's EAN barcode, expected quantity against received quantity. Nothing is transcribed by hand, nothing is counted by eye, and every difference becomes a documented incident with author and timestamp. When something is missing, you don't argue with the supplier. You send them the report.

How It Works, in Five Steps

A single delivery flows through the platform like this:

• 1. Upload the delivery note. The operator uploads the supplier's PDF in New Reception. No manual transcription of lines, codes or quantities.
• 2. Automatic extraction. The parsing engine reads the document and extracts every product with its expected units. An unstructured supplier PDF becomes structured reception data in seconds.
• 3. Assignment, the delivery note is registered as pending and can be assigned to specific operators, so admins always know who is receiving what.
• 4. Verification by EAN scanning, the operator scans each product's barcode. The platform matches it against the delivery note, counts received against expected, and shows live progress.
• 5. Incidents and history, missing units, extra units and unknown products are recorded as incidents. The verified reception lands in the history and the operations log, ready for reports and supplier claims.

Built for a Loading Dock, Not for a Demo

The flow reads simply, but warehouses are a hostile environment for software. These are the capabilities that make it dependable where the work actually happens:

• A PDF parser treated as critical infrastructure. Supplier delivery notes are messy and change format without notice. The extraction engine is the most heavily tested component of the system, with 84 automated test cases of its own.
• Offline-first PWA, the operator can download a delivery note and verify it entirely without coverage, because the back room of a store is exactly where Wi-Fi dies. Progress syncs automatically when the connection returns.
• Multi-device verification that merges instead of overwriting, two people can split a large delivery. When two devices verify the same delivery note, progress is merged rather than lost, and the operators are notified on screen.
• An audit trail with 21 typed actions, logins, uploads, assignments, verification progress and master data changes all leave a persistent trace with author and timestamp. When there is a dispute, the history answers it.
• Hardened and minimal by design, strict security headers, rate limiting, bcrypt passwords, dual-secret JWT sessions and Zod validation on every route. And the only personal data in the whole system are each user's name and email, no tracking, no analytics cookies, minimal GDPR surface.

The Same Engine, Applied to More Processes

Verifying a delivery note against reality is one instance of a much bigger pattern, check what was promised against what actually happened, and act on the difference automatically. The engine behind Almacén-Pro opens the door to processes like:

• Failed home deliveries that fix themselves, the system checks which orders were actually delivered and, when one wasn't, contacts the customer automatically by email or by an AI phone call, your order couldn't be delivered, tell us the right address or when we can try again. No agent dialing numbers, no order lost in limbo.
• Invoice reconciliation for shipping agencies and distributors. The same matching logic that checks a delivery note against scanned products can check supplier invoices against verified receptions, what was billed against what actually arrived, line by line, with every difference flagged for claim instead of paid by default.
• Any promised-versus-real process, purchase orders against goods received, manifests against loaded parcels, stock counts against system stock. If your operation compares a document with reality by hand, this engine automates it.

What the Platform Delivers

• Delivery notes captured in seconds from the supplier PDF, with no paper and no manual transcription
• Product-by-product verification with EAN scanning, expected against received
• Every missing item documented as an incident, with the evidence to claim it back from the supplier
• A complete audit history of who received what, when, and what was wrong
• Reception that keeps working offline and syncs when coverage returns
• Isolated per-client instances, each with its own database, on managed infrastructure

The Numbers Behind It

A reception tool that miscounts is worse than paper, so the engineering bar is high:

• React 19 + Vite 6 PWA frontend with offline verification and deferred sync
• Node.js 20 + Express + TypeScript backend, strictly typed end to end
• 16 business modules with dependency injection, PostgreSQL with versioned migrations
• Custom PDF extraction engine built on pdfjs-dist
• 126 automated test cases, 84 of them on the parser alone, plus integration tests and an end-to-end Playwright test
• Isolated production and staging environments on Railway. Every change is validated against a separate database before promotion

How Many Delivery Notes Does Your Business Receive Each Week?

Multiply them by the minutes spent ticking lines with a pen, and by the merchandise that goes missing without anyone being able to prove it. That is the real cost of paper. Almacén-Pro is what we mean by custom software, not a generic ERP module bent out of shape, but a focused tool built around one critical operational flow, engineered to production standards. If your operation still depends on paper, spreadsheets and memory, tell us which process hurts the most. We build the system around it.

• Explore our custom software development services
• Read the Alquilia AI assistant case study
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