War Chief

A Windows program. One line of stations in the order the work happens: Inventory, Shelf, Orders, Ship, Mail, Books, then People, Calendar, Marketing and Website, on one bar across the top that stays put whatever is under it. Every act is one entry with Undo, and each step feeds the next: a buy stocks and pays, a batch consumes and shelves, a sale sells and books the tax, a label books the postage and ships. A swipe across the page takes you to the next station.

Your own web tabs open under that bar, a set for every station, listed down the left with the desk on the right, so the bank, the label service and the marketplace are each one click away. What they download, or what you drag out of them onto the desk, lands where it belongs.

When you set up a company you choose where it is kept. On this computer, everything you enter is saved as plain files, with a backup kept each day, and Download a backup puts the whole desk in one file. Nothing of yours leaves the computer but the sign-in, which also means it lives on that one computer: keep the backup file somewhere else too. In the cloud, its tables sit in Iron Roots' database under your account, so every computer you sign in on opens the same books, and what each one saves is merged; when two change the same box, the later save wins. Other accounts cannot read them, but Iron Roots, which runs that database, can: they are not end-to-end encrypted. A company in the cloud needs a connection to open and to save, holds about 10,000 records a table and 25 MB an account, and never holds your mail or shipping keys, so those are typed again on each computer.