Reusable assets only earn the name if you know where they are. This US recycling operator ran the entire pickup-to-invoice cycle on phone calls, spreadsheets and manual entry, with no trail on a single crate.
Start your projectThe build
ThgGo, which shipped originally as Reel Recycling, manages the return loop for reusable cable reels.
Customers request a pickup, drivers collect, and the reels move through refurbishment back into circulation. Aipxperts built the platform over roughly three and a half years: a Laravel web portal, mobile APIs for drivers and customers, and an automated path from a completed collection to an invoice in QuickBooks.
The problem
Reusable assets only earn their name if you know where they are. This operation was running the entire pickup-to-invoice cycle on phone calls, spreadsheets and manual QuickBooks entry. The gaps that created:
Pickup requests arrived by phone, so there was no queue anyone could see or prioritise.
Drivers closed jobs verbally, which meant no evidence of what was collected or what condition it was in.
There was no serial-level trail on individual crates, so a reel that went missing could not be traced to a customer, a driver or a date.
Invoicing was manual re-entry into QuickBooks, done from records that were themselves assembled by hand.
Each of those is survivable alone. Together they mean the business cannot answer its two most important questions: where is my inventory, and have I billed for it.
What we built
We built the system around the driver's moment of collection, because that is where the data is created and where every downstream record originates.
Customers raise and track pickup requests, view status and modify or cancel them, replacing the phone queue with a visible one.
Drivers close jobs on a mobile device with photographs and bill of lading capture, so the collection carries its own evidence.
Individual crates tracked through the loop, which is what makes a reusable asset genuinely accountable rather than nominally reusable.
Stock levels updating as collections close, rather than being reconstructed periodically.
Summaries generated from field records and pushed into the client's accounting system without manual entry.
A custom routing service takes pickup and driver data in and writes optimised routes back, so a day's collections are sequenced rather than assigned in the order they were requested.
Drivers scan crates and capture signatures on the device, which is what makes the serial-level trail hold up at the point of handover rather than depending on typed entry.
Flutter background services keep driver position current during a route without the app needing to stay in the foreground.
Built on Caffeinated modules with Laravel Telescope for observability, so the operational, driver and billing domains stay separable as the product grows.
The outcome
The operational result is a closed loop. Every reel now has a location, a custody history and a billing record attached to the same event, which is the difference between reusable assets as an accounting concept and reusable assets you can actually find.
Laravel 8
PHP 7.4
Flutter
JWT and Sanctum
MySQL
Google Maps
DigitalOcean SpacesIf your assets are meant to come back and nobody can say where they are, the tracking gap is usually at the point of collection.
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