# An internal ordering system that moved €600k in five weeks

> Baumit · Construction & building materials · 2024 · Palma Design
> Built with: Softr, Airtable, DocsAutomator, Gmail
> Results: 100+ employees onboarded · 2,500+ orders in five weeks · €600k merchandise ordered
> Source: https://palmadesign.io/work/baumit

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Baumit — a leading European building-materials company — needed an internal shop where 100+ field employees could order branded workwear and equipment against individual budgets. A custom-coded attempt had proven hard to use, and off-the-shelf e-commerce couldn't handle the two things that mattered most: per-employee budgets and authenticated, employee-only access.

## The problem

The requirements ruled out the obvious tools. The system had to:

- restrict the shop to registered employees, each with an individual budget limit;
- give admins control to adjust budgets per user;
- show every employee a personal dashboard of spend and orders;
- calculate dynamically across varied packaging and product sizes;
- generate branded PDF order summaries with custom fields (like print positions).

> The combination of personalized budgets, user-specific dashboards, and admin controls proved challenging for traditional e-commerce solutions.

## The approach

Rather than force it into a shop platform, we built it as a no-code application on **Softr** over an **Airtable** back end — the data model the business actually needed, with a real interface on top. Access, roles and budgets became data, not custom code.

## What we built

- Filtered shop views so only registered employees see the shop, each scoped to their own budget.
- A shopping cart with live budget tracking and real-time packaging and inventory calculations.
- An admin dashboard to manage users and adjust budgets.
- Conditional forms that render a custom view per user.
- Branded PDF order summaries via **DocsAutomator**, delivered through Gmail.

## The result

The app went live and was in real use across the company within weeks.

- **100+** employees onboarded
- **2,500+** orders placed in the first five weeks
- **€600,000** in merchandise ordered through the system

The team's verdict: *"a huge improvement over what we had before — much more efficient."*

This is the pattern we repeat: a clear data model, a permissioned interface, and the boring parts (auth, roles, budgets, documents) solved once and kept running.