TLC Dealer

The parser knows the product

A model code isn’t an opaque string — it encodes the machine. The parser pulls cooling capacity in BTU straight out of it, and matches the product series across ten rule patterns. That means a scan doesn’t just record a number, it produces a unit the system actually understands.

Making the model behave

The vision endpoint uses forced tool use — the model is required to answer through a typed schema, so it physically cannot return prose that then has to be parsed. Every request reports its own cost in dollars, computed from token usage and returned with the result.

And there’s a guard for a failure mode learned the hard way: model codes end in /O for outdoor, and vision models read that letter as a zero. It’s warned about in the prompt and corrected after the fact. Belt and braces, because a wrong model code means a wrong warranty claim.

Stock has two owners

When a main dealer hands units to a sub-dealer, the goods move but the ownership doesn’t — it’s consignment. So every unit carries both who owns it and who is currently holding it. A single owner field cannot express that, and getting it wrong means nobody can answer “where is my stock?”

Sub-dealers are modelled as tenants too, with a parent link — the dealer network is a tree, not a flat list.

An air conditioner is two things

A split unit is an indoor and an outdoor half, each with its own serial and its own sticker, sold as one machine and warrantied as one machine. The schema pairs them explicitly, so scanning one half can find and suggest the other — and so a sale can’t accidentally ship half a product.

A sale has four independent states

Real sales don’t fit one status field. Payment can be partial while the invoice is still unissued, the installation is scheduled for next week, and the whole thing went through the wholesale channel rather than retail. Those are four orthogonal axes, and collapsing them into a single enum is how sales software starts lying to the people using it.