What Ardesia actually does.

01 / WORKSPACE

One place to see the whole office.

The Control Room is the home view. Today's quotes, the orders moving through, messages waiting for a reply, invoices going out. The four zones don't change. What's inside them does.

The Control Room is divided into four zones. Across the top, four metrics: monthly revenue, open quotes, orders in progress, and a redline count of urgent items. On the left, incoming messages — emails and WhatsApp threads, one marked urgent. In the centre, open quotes and orders with their status, and below them drafts awaiting review. On the right, recent outgoing invoices and the day's tasks. The view stays calm; small ambient updates indicate it is live.

02 / CRM & LEDGER

Every conversation, on the customer's record.

Emails and WhatsApp threads get indexed against the customer they belong to. Same for the attachments — every PDF spec, every photo from the warehouse, every signed quote. Contacts and departments stay separate but linked, so a message from amministrazione@cliente.it lands on the right company even if no person is named.

Search the way you remember things. A supplier name, a part number, a phrase from an email last spring. Open a result and you see the whole thread — every quote, every order, every shipping document, every reply — on one timeline.

A search for "ferraris cnc gennaio" returns three matching results. The strongest match opens into a customer page: at the top, the company's contacts and departments. Below, a five-event timeline — a WhatsApp thread from January, the quote that followed, the order placed two weeks later, the delivery note, and the pro-forma invoice. A small panel on the right lists every attachment from the threads: two technical drawings, one signed quote, three photos of a finished part.

03 / PRICING

Prices with rules, not memory.

A price book per currency. Volume tiers that decrease with quantity. Minimum order quantities, sale multiples, setup costs, per-line minimums — all enforced at quote time, not discovered after.

Customer-specific contracts override the base list: a fixed discount for one client, a category-wide promotion for the rest of the market. Future prices go in with their own effective date, so a planned April increase doesn't rewrite the March quotes. The mechanism that keeps the past intact is the same one that lets the future be scheduled.

And on every quote, a guardrail: the gross margin against your reference cost, visible in real time. Below the floor, the line is flagged before the quote can be sent. Sales doesn't have to remember the rules — the rules are in the form.

A quote is being built for Lombardo S.r.l. — a packaging-roll customer. Three line items. Line 1: 500 metres of film, base price €2.40/m. The customer's contract is in effect: a 7% discount applies automatically, shown as a small annotation on the line. Line 2: 1,200 metres of the same film — the quantity crosses the volume tier at 1,000m, so the unit price drops to €2.15/m. Line 3: a roll cutter accessory at the minimum sale multiple of 4 units; the operator tried to enter 3, the field corrected it with a tooltip. At the bottom right, gross margin: 28%, above the company's 22% floor. A small history panel shows three previous quotes to the same customer in the last six months, with their final prices for reference.

04 / COMMERCE

From quote to delivery note.

A quote takes a few minutes to build because the prices, discounts, and rules are already in the system. When the customer accepts, the quote becomes an order — and the quote itself locks. No silent edits to a document the customer has on file. The version they signed is the version you keep.

From the order flow the documents that follow: delivery notes for the warehouse, pro-forma invoices for the customer's bookkeeper. The financial detail is separated cleanly from the shipping detail, so the DDT goes with the goods and the pro-forma goes to amministrazione — neither one carrying the other's data.

And on every quote, the margin guardrail. The gross margin against reference cost is shown on each line and on the total. Below the floor, the line is flagged. The check that used to happen after the invoice went out happens before the quote does.

A quote for Bianchi Componenti — a fittings supplier in Brescia — is open. Four line items for stainless steel gaskets in different DIN sizes. The contract discount of 5% is applied automatically. Line 3 shows a margin warning in red: 14% against a floor of 22%. The operator opens the reference panel — the last three quotes to Bianchi for the same part show a margin of 24%, 23%, and 25%. The current line is corrected. Margin returns to 23%. The quote is sent. Two days later it's accepted; the system converts it to an order and locks the quote. A delivery note is generated for the warehouse showing four lines of merchandise, weights, and packing — no prices. A pro-forma invoice is generated separately for the customer's amministrazione: imponibile €3,420, sconto €171, IVA €717.78, total €3,966.78. Status pills on each document: order in lavorazione, pro-forma da incassare.

05 / AI ASSIST

Argo handles the repetitive work.

Three things Argo does, on demand. It drafts a quote from a description — "200 metres of belt class 200, with side cleats, for Pearson" — pulling the right SKU, the contract price, and the matching delivery terms. It summarises a customer relationship before you call them — open complaints, pending discount requests, the last three orders. It reads incoming PDFs — a request for quote, a customer specification — and fills the order form from what it finds.

In every case, you stay in charge. The quote is a draft until you approve it. The summary is for you, not for the customer. The extracted fields are pre-filled, not committed. Argo never sends anything outward on its own.

Three small panels show the three modes. Panel one: a chat where the operator types "Prepara un preventivo per Pearson, 200m DBPH21733 con bordini, consegna come l'ultima volta." Argo returns a draft quote with the SKU resolved, the price pulled from the active price book, the delivery terms inherited from the customer's last order, and a "review before sending" annotation in the header. Panel two: an executive briefing on Müller GmbH — three bullets summarising a recent technical complaint, a pending request for a 4% discount, and a delivery delay flagged two weeks ago. Panel three: an incoming PDF from a customer (a richiesta di offerta) opens on the left; on the right, an order form with five lines pre-filled from the PDF — part numbers, quantities, requested delivery date — each field showing a small icon indicating its source in the document.