What this is
FrontBeacon builds one thing: the step between an emailed purchase order and a sales order your ERP will accept. Not a platform, not a suite, and not an attempt to run your order-to-cash process. One step, which is currently done by a person reading a PDF and typing.
It was founded by Muhammad Ali Shahbaz and is built by a small team working on this one problem. If you email the address on this site, you reach the people who make it — ask how the unit conversion works and the answer comes from someone who wrote it.
Where it honestly stands
There are no logos or accuracy percentages on this site. A number produced on our own test documents would tell you nothing about yours, and we would rather show you the real thing on your own purchase orders than ask you to take a claim on trust.
What exists is a working product with a deliberate design position — it blocks on uncertainty rather than guessing — and a way for you to test that claim against your own purchase orders for free before any money or integration is involved.
What a small vendor costs you, and what it buys
The costs are real and worth naming. There is no 24/7 support desk. There is no enterprise procurement paperwork already sitting on a shelf. We are not a company your IT director has heard of, and we have no long reference list to hide behind.
What it buys is the other side of that. Nothing is filtered through an account manager who has to check with engineering. A format your customer uses that nothing else handles is a conversation, not a roadmap request. And the price is what it is because there is no sales organisation to fund.
The risk is also bounded by design rather than by reassurance. Your ERP stays the system of record, the output is a file you can open and read, and FrontBeacon never holds the only copy of anything that matters to your business.
How we would rather sell to you
A prospect who turned us down recently made a point worth publishing: he had asked for something to read on his own time and was pushed toward a meeting instead. He was right, and it changed how this works.
So: read the pages. If the reasoning holds up, send us fifteen to twenty-five redacted purchase orders and we will show you what the system does with them, free, in three to five days. If that report is unconvincing, you have lost a morning. There is no sequence of follow-ups waiting behind it.
Common questions
- How big is FrontBeacon?
- Small, and deliberately so. You will not be handed to an account manager who has to check with engineering — the people you speak to are the people building the thing. What that costs you and what it buys you is set out on this page rather than glossed over.
- Can we see it working before we commit?
- That is the whole point of the Accuracy Snapshot, and it is why we lead with it rather than with a reference list. You send redacted purchase orders and see the system's output on your own documents, free, before any money or integration is involved. A reference customer's workflow tells you far less than your own does.
- What happens if you stop working on it?
- A fair question to ask a small vendor, and the answer is built into the product rather than promised on a page. FrontBeacon never becomes the system of record: your ERP holds every order, and the output is a file you can already read. If this disappeared tomorrow you would be back to keying orders by hand — inconvenient, but not stranded, and no data of yours lives anywhere you cannot get it.
- Where are you based?
- FrontBeacon is built outside the US and sells into it. Calls are scheduled in your working morning, invoices are in USD, and payment is by ACH or wire against normal documentation. If that is a problem for your procurement process, better to say so on the first call than the fifth.
- Why industrial distribution, and why fasteners first?
- Because it is a real, specific, unglamorous problem with a measurable cost, in an industry where the details — units, pack sizes, customer part numbers — genuinely defeat general-purpose tools. Fasteners came first because that is where our evidence is; the same work applies across industrial distribution and the other verticals follow it.