Ridge
Ridge is a case system for marine service companies and ship chandlers: one case holds the vessel, the equipment, the suppliers, the crew and every document — from the first inquiry to the handover to accounting.
Without a system
The quotation is in one file. The supplier's purchase order is in another, in another currency. The margin is rebuilt by hand in Excel every time a price moves — and rebuilt again when the customer removes two lines.
The SAF gets assembled from scraps the day before it has to be signed, because nothing was recorded as the case went along. The rate used in January is anyone's guess by March.
None of these files know about each other, so every figure is typed a second time — and each retype is a chance to be wrong on a document a customer has already been sent.
The cycle
The request arrives. Vessel, customer, scope.
Priced, revised, approved, sent.
Suppliers, purchase orders, staff assigned.
Billed against what was actually delivered.
Cost against revenue. Signed before the invoice goes out.
Issued, sent, closed. Handed over.
This is where Ridge parts company with a general CRM. A general CRM models deals and contacts, and leaves the trade to you. Ridge models the marine cycle: inside the case live the vessel and its equipment, the suppliers quoting on it, the crew assigned to it and their costs — not in an address book bolted on beside it.
Inside
Margin is computed at the quotation, at the order and at the invoice. A zero or negative margin blocks the documents and requires an explicit approval — before the purchase order is generated and before the invoice is issued, not after it has been sent.
Quotation, Purchase Order, Order Confirmation, Invoice, Credit Note, SAF — all generated from the same case. Prices, currencies, vessel details and company letterhead are entered once and never retyped into a second file.
Documents are signed in the browser and the signature is written into the PDF itself. Every signature is recorded — who signed, which document and revision, and when.
The buy currency and its exchange rate are stored on each line at the moment the deal is made. Yesterday's quotation still totals what it totalled yesterday, whatever the market did overnight.
Edits, deletions and status moves are logged with the old and the new value. A logged change can be rolled back from the log — a deleted supplier, a wrong price, a status moved by mistake.
Access is granted per module. Inside a module, reading is separate from editing, and individual actions — approve, sign, restore — are separate again. A bookkeeper can reach the billing queue without seeing a single purchase price.
How it was made
Ridge was built by a marine service technician — not by an agency working from a specification handed over in a meeting.
That shows up in the details that a specification never contains: which field you actually need open at the quay, which number the office asks for first, what a case looks like when the scope changes after the parts have already been ordered.
Every screen grew out of the job it describes, rather than out of an idea of that job.