Tornillería OTTO
Paysandú, Uruguay
A storefront site and a full invoicing backend for a 39-year-old industrial hardware and fastener business, replacing a legacy FoxPro/DBF system with modern software and DGI-compliant electronic invoicing.
Before Railblazers
Tornillería OTTO had never had a website, a Google listing, or a social page, 39 years of business, entirely offline, and customers found them by driving past the store or asking around Paysandú. Behind the counter wasn't much better: their invoicing and inventory ran on a FoxPro system with DBF databases decades old, brittle, undocumented, and full of quirks nobody left at the company fully understood anymore.
What we built, and why
OTTO didn't want a webshop. Running an online store means managing orders, stock, and payments in a completely different way than they're used to, and that wasn't the shift they were ready to make, so we didn't force it on them.
Instead we built a static site: a browsable catalog with no cart, no checkout, and nothing dynamic running behind it. Customers can look through what OTTO carries, then reach out with a single tap on a WhatsApp button to actually buy, the same way they'd ask in person, just from further away.
Static also means simple to keep running: no database, no backend to patch, nothing to break on the storefront. For a business taking its first step online, that was the right trade to make, not the fallback one.
That simplicity was for the storefront. Behind the counter, OTTO's real problem was a different beast: invoicing and inventory running on a decades-old FoxPro system with DBF database files, carrying every version-specific quirk and undocumented workaround that accumulates over that many years of patches on top of patches. We reverse-engineered that system from the ground up, recovered years of historical records straight out of the old DBF files, and rebuilt it on a modern framework, wired directly into DGI's CFE system so every invoice OTTO issues is generated and reported electronically under Uruguay's tax rules, with automated tools handling accounting work that used to be done by hand.
What's included
- Browsable product catalog
- One-tap WhatsApp contact for orders
- Fast, mobile-first storefront
- DGI-compliant electronic invoicing (CFE)
- Automated accounting assistance
- Full backend rebuild, with historical data recovered from the old FoxPro/DBF system
Integrations
Where it stands today
What's different now is reach, and what's running behind the counter. Before, OTTO's business stopped at whoever walked past the store or heard about it by word of mouth in Paysandú, and their invoicing ran on a FoxPro system from another era. Now the website, Instagram, and WhatsApp Business work together as one front door, so a customer anywhere in Uruguay can find OTTO, browse what's in stock, and start a conversation. Behind the scenes, every invoice they issue is generated and reported electronically through DGI's CFE system, and accounting work that used to eat up hours by hand is now handled by automated tools, on a modern system built to last instead of one nobody could safely touch.