Serial Number Registry & Lookup
Build an internal tool that tracks every serialized unit from receipt to return and answers any warranty, recall, or customer question by serial in seconds.
A searchable, login-protected serial registry where every unit's status and location is tracked through receipt, stock, shipment, and return, with a lead approving key status changes and a one-click CSV history export.
Before you start
- A free Supabase account
- A free Vercel account
- A free Resend account
- A spreadsheet or CSV of your serialized item movements
The problem this kills
A customer calls with a serial number and a warranty claim. A recall notice lands and you need to know exactly which units shipped and to whom. A unit comes back as an RMA and nobody is sure if it was ever sold. Right now the answer lives in three spreadsheets, two inboxes, and someone's memory. So you guess, you stall, or you spend an hour reconstructing a chain of custody that should have taken five seconds.
The real cost is not the lookup time. It is the wrong answer: honoring a warranty you should not have, missing a recalled unit that is still in the field, or accepting a return for something you never sold. When the same serial shows up "active" in two places, you can't trust any of it.
What you'll build
An internal web app where every serialized unit has one authoritative record. You capture each serial at receipt, then move it through statuses - in stock, allocated, shipped, returned, scrapped - as it travels. Each move is logged with who, what, and when. A lead approves the high-stakes changes (especially ship and RMA) before the record updates, so the chain of custody stays clean. Anyone on the team can type a serial and instantly see its full history. And you can export any serial's history, or the whole registry, as a clean CSV.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
- A copy-paste runbook you feed to an AI coding agent (Claude Code) that builds the whole tool with you - no prior coding needed.
- It opens by interviewing you about your business - your current process, your systems and spreadsheets, your exact serial and SKU naming, your status definitions, your volumes, and your messy exceptions - so the tool is tailored to how you actually work, not a generic template.
- Step-by-step build instructions, each ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.
- A data model and validation rules shaped by your answers - including a guard that stops the same serial being active in two places and rules that enforce valid status transitions.
- A no-API fallback so you can build it today: import serial movements from a sheet and export the registry as CSV in the exact columns your system expects.
- A verification checklist so you know it actually works before you trust it.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can use the tool.
- Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's data.
- A complete audit trail - every status change records who did it and when.
- A human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts a status change, a lead reviews and approves, and only then is the serial's record committed. Critical for ship and RMA moves.
- Duplicate guards - the same serial can't be registered twice, and the same movement can't be processed twice.
Who it's for
Inventory control, customer service, and warranty/quality teams who live and die by serial numbers - anyone who has ever been asked "where is unit XYZ?" and wished the answer took one search instead of one hour.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.