(Enterprise) Jun 2025 — Present · Webbrains Technologies
Company sign-in, and a permanent record of every stock movement.
An inventory system for an enterprise manufacturer. Staff sign in with their company accounts, stock is tracked rack by rack, and every movement is recorded with who did it and when.
(01) In numbers
Stock, transfers, adjustments and reconciliation
Including the audit trail the ledger is read from
Admin, Manager and Operator, with different reach
No second set of credentials to issue or revoke
(02) Under the hood
01 · OPERATOR
A stock movement starts with a person at a terminal, and the system has to be able to name that person afterwards.
02 · DIRECTORY
Credentials are checked against the directory the organisation already runs. Nothing new is issued here, and nothing new has to be revoked later.
03 · SESSION
The directory says who; the session carries it. Every request after this one is attributable without another round trip.
04 · ACCESS
Roles and permissions are records in the model rather than branches in a controller. Changing what a Manager may do is not a change to code.
05 · API
Express routers per module — stock, transfers, adjustments, reconciliation — with validation applied before the handler.
06 · DOMAIN
The service that moves stock is the service that records the move. There is no path that does one without the other.
07 · LEDGER
User, action and timestamp, written with the transaction. Reconciliation reads the ledger instead of inferring from the current quantity.
(03) The story
01 — The Problem
Stock that moves without a name against it is stock you cannot reconcile. And the staff moving it already had directory credentials — a second account per person is one more thing to provision, rotate, and forget to disable.
02 — What I Built
LDAP authenticates against the organisation's own directory and the session carries the role. Stock movement and audit record are written by one code path, so no route can move a quantity quietly.
03 — What Changed
The ledger answers who moved this and when, directly, instead of that question being reconstructed from quantities. Access follows the directory: when a person leaves it, they leave the system.
(04) Architecture
01
Operator, manager and administrator views onto the same inventory service.
02
LDAP: the organisation's existing identity, used as it is.
03
Express modules for stock, transfers, adjustments and reconciliation.
04
Dynamic role and permission models, resolved per route.
05
The stock service — a movement and its audit record on one path.
06
26 Mongoose models, with the audit trail indexed for reconciliation.
(05) Decisions
Authenticating against LDAP means the system holds no opinion about passwords. Provisioning, rotation and revocation stay with the directory, which is where they were being done anyway.
It is written by the same function that moves the stock, not by a caller who might forget. An unaudited movement would have to be a bug in one place rather than an omission in a dozen.
Admin, Manager and Operator are records with permissions attached. Adding a fourth is data; a controller full of role comparisons would have been a deploy.
(06) Built with
Enterprise identity, with the audit trail treated as a first-class model.
For the technically curiousLDAP single sign-on, and an audit row on every stock movement. An enterprise stock system where every movement had to be attributable, and where staff already had directory credentials they should not have to duplicate. LDAP single sign-on now carries role-based permissions for Admin, Manager and Operator, and every stock transaction writes an audit row with user and timestamp for reconciliation.
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