Dental Clinic Inventory & Client Management

A dental clinic was running inventory the way most clinics do: paper logs, monthly manual counts, and a perpetual guessing game about what needed ordering. When they ran out of a specific composite shade mid-procedure, someone had to drive to a supplier during business hours.

Client history lived across paper files, the appointment system, and the practitioner's memory. Cross-referencing what materials a patient had used in previous visits (important for allergies, restorations matching existing work) required flipping through physical folders while a patient sat in the chair.

They needed a system that worked the way a clinic actually operates: fast input during appointments, barcode scanning for inventory because typing SKUs is not realistic between patients, and client history accessible in seconds.

I built phase one focused on inventory management with barcode scanning. The web app supports USB and Bluetooth barcode scanners through the HID API, so staff scan items as they arrive and as they're used. Stock levels update in real-time, low-stock alerts trigger reorder workflows.

The architecture uses AWS EC2 and RDS PostgreSQL, chosen specifically because the client has healthcare-adjacent data requirements and AWS provides the compliance controls they needed. The database schema was designed from day one with multi-tenancy in mind, even though the first phase is single-clinic. Adding tenant isolation later would have meant a painful migration.

Phase two expands to client history and booking management, with the same architectural patterns. The end state is a multi-tenant SaaS that other clinics can deploy, but the first customer gets a fully-working system tuned to their workflow.