Challenge
The engagement opened as staff augmentation on a defined PHP scope and expanded into a multi product, multi stack engineering partnership as new requirements surfaced. 6 issues defined the working scope over the life of the engagement, spanning the multi carrier operations back office, the ShipSimple consumer SaaS build, and the surrounding launch surface.
Multi carrier invoice ingestion across incompatible feeds. Courier Gateway’s operating model depends on aggregating charges from 5+ national couriers (Canada Post, Purolator, GLS, Loomis, DHL, and others), each of which delivered charge data in a different shape. Live APIs required authentication handling and rate aware polling. Excel and CSV drops arrived on partner specific schedules and formats. EDI transmissions required standards aware parsing before any field could be mapped. Every feed needed to land in a normalized invoice record that the operations team could annotate with customer specific markup and fees before it went to QuickBooks. Building a single ingestion path that absorbed all 4 shapes reliably across every carrier was the technical center of the first workstream.
QuickBooks reconciliation accuracy under carrier variance. Every normalized invoice pushed to QuickBooks translated directly into a customer facing charge from Courier Gateway to its small business customers, which was the revenue mechanism of the entire brokerage. Fees applied to a normalized record had to reconcile back against the source carrier charge in the original feed, whether that source was an EDI transmission that had already been parsed once, a partner uploaded Excel or CSV drop, or a live API response with its own timestamp and currency handling. Errors would surface in Courier Gateway’s billing to end customers days later. Reversing the impact then carried both financial and reputational cost, and the discount claim (up to 75% off retail rates) that defines the brand positioning depended on the reconciliation being precise. Error recovery paths were required at both the ingestion boundary and the QuickBooks write step, since a failure at either boundary would corrupt a downstream invoice.
ShipSimple on a distinct quality bar from the operations workstream. Courier Gateway’s second ambition was ShipSimple, a consumer facing SaaS product on React that would let a small business schedule a shipment with a pickup or dropoff option, track packages once shipped, review shipment history, manage billing, and store repeat shipping addresses. Consumer grade quality expectations for that flow, including responsive design, error recovery under intermittent connectivity, and a scheduling calendar that had to accept both pickup and dropoff variants, sat above what the back office invoicing workstream demanded. The React build ran on its own SOW with its own resourcing while the PHP back office work continued in parallel.
API ownership handoff mid delivery. 3 weeks into the React front end build, Courier Gateway determined that Clixlogix should take over the back end API and platform development for ShipSimple as well. That required a second Statement of Work covering back end engineering plus a Business Analyst embedded in the sprint cadence for requirements clarification and Jira management. The handoff had to happen without breaking the front end team’s assumptions about the API contract.
Marketing site as a separate deliverable. ShipSimple needed a public marketing website distinct from the SaaS app itself, positioned as the acquisition surface for Canadian small businesses discovering the platform through search. Content management had to sit on a stack Courier Gateway could maintain post launch without engineering support. Clixlogix owned the build; Courier Gateway handled the go live migration internally. Coordinating a separate delivery track that ran on a compressed 9 day window inside the same engagement required a third resource pool.
Analytics instrumentation before launch traffic. ShipSimple needed marketing measurement in place before any acquisition traffic hit the site. Google Tag Manager installation, URL prefix configuration on the property, and confirmation that the tags respected privacy expectations landed as the final Statement of Work of the engagement.
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