What we actually do

Paramita Software is a small custom software development company, based in Umhlanga, Durban. We write and maintain the systems businesses actually run on: order capture, stock management, reporting, the software behind the counter rather than in front of it.

Custom, not off the shelf

Most businesses of any size end up running on a mix of software: some bought off the shelf, some built years ago by someone who has since moved on, some held together by a spreadsheet and a person who remembers why. That mix is normal. It’s also where the real cost sits, in the gaps between systems, in the steps a person has to do by hand because two systems don’t talk to each other, in the reports that take a day to compile because the data lives in three different places.

We build software that fits the business it’s for, rather than asking the business to reshape itself around a generic product. That sometimes means a new system from scratch. More often it means replacing one part of an existing setup, carefully, while everything around it keeps running.

A small team, close to the work

We’re deliberately small. That means the people writing the software are also the people talking to the business about what it needs to do, and the people testing it against real data before it goes live. Nothing gets handed off between departments that never speak to each other.

It also means we build in stages. A large rewrite delivered all at once is a large risk delivered all at once: if something is wrong, everything is wrong, on the day everyone is depending on it working. We’d rather deliver a working piece, get it in front of the people who’ll actually use it, fix what needs fixing, and move on to the next piece. It takes longer to describe than “we’ll have it done by March”, but it’s a much safer way to replace something a business depends on.

What we’re working on now

Right now, most of our time goes into iStoko, a stock and purchase-order system we’re building for a multi-store South African retailer, to replace a system that has run their business for years and reached the point where it could no longer be safely changed. We’ll be writing about that work here as it happens: the decisions, the setbacks, the parts that turned out harder than expected. It’s a useful way to show how we actually work, rather than just saying it.

If any of this sounds like a problem you’re carrying, or you’d just like to know more about how we work, get in touch.