A deal desk for a trading business

This one is for a wholesale trading business of our own, and its offers arrive as WhatsApp messages. Someone has to price each one, tell the right buyers and invoice the deal once it closes. The business stays unnamed here, and the picture above is a sketch rather than a screenshot.

A deal desk lives on speed. An offer that sits unread in a chat thread can be gone by the time anyone prices it. The work also needs a record: what was offered, what it was worth, who heard about it and what was invoiced. A chat thread keeps none of that in a form anyone can search later.

We started from our CRM chassis, the codebase behind the Tidewater sales desk, and added a WhatsApp bridge that runs on Fly. The bridge captures inbound offers and turns each one into a deal on the desk, with the message it came from kept on the record.

The screens below are a replica over made-up sellers, buyers and deals: the thread, the deal it becomes, and the board the deal travels across.

From there the desk carries the deal: pricing lookups on the goods, a blast to the buyers who should see it, and invoicing when it closes. Each deal carries its own record: the offer, its pricing, the buyers who heard about it and the invoice.

The board groups deals by where they are, in the order a deal travels, and the column that cannot wait carries a chip that says so. A deal moves when the desk moves it, and the record moves with it.

Because the desk shares the chassis, roles and invoicing were in place from the first day, and the new work went into the parts only a trading desk needs.