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FAQ

Ask the awkward questions.

Straight answers, including the ones with rough edges. Where a detail isn’t confirmed yet, it says so. Nothing here is invented.

Product
What does Lite include versus Professional?
Lite covers stock and full traceability, purchasing, and sales through to despatch, with the dashboard and three core reports. Professional adds invoicing and aged debt, production and works orders, the shop-floor app with picking, cut pricing, AI goods-in capture, the AI assistant and full reporting. Corporate adds multi-currency, credit control, accounting export (Xero, Sage, QuickBooks), the customer portal, fleet and transport, and EDI, API access and white-label.
Does it handle catch-weight and dual units?
Yes. It's built around them. Every batch carries a theoretical and an actual weight. Prices work per kg, per metre, per each or lump sum. Invoices can use either weight basis, and variance over 2% is flagged for review.
How does heat and certificate traceability actually work?
Every physical lot is a batch with its heat and cast number. A mill certificate is a record holding the PDF plus the extracted chemistry and mechanicals. Each one is matched to its batch by heat number and ranked EN 10204 2.1 to 3.2. Customers can require a minimum certificate type, and allocation and despatch gate on it. Splits, cuts, remnants and subcontract returns all keep the genealogy.
Can customers download their own paperwork?
Yes. The customer portal gives each customer their orders, invoices, statements and credit position. It also builds one-click document bundles (delivery notes, cert packs, invoices), served on short-lived secure links.
Do you support cutting and production?
Works orders consume a parent batch and produce outputs, remnants and scrap with inherited heat and certificate. 1D cutting lists handle kerf, end trim and minimum offcut; there's a scheduling board and a shop-floor app for operators. Cut-piece pricing charges cut length plus kerf plus facing allowance, by saw type.
What about weighing?
Goods-in supports two-stage receipt: book material in from the delivery note, and it sits as awaiting-weight and unsellable until the actual weight is confirmed. At despatch, the scales record gross, tare and net against the load.
Is there proof of delivery?
Yes. A single-use ePOD link opens on the driver's or customer's phone, captures an on-glass signature and any exceptions. A clean POD can trigger the invoice automatically.
Migration
Can you import from our legacy system?
That's the point of the migration offer. Customers, suppliers, stock codes, live batches with heats, certificate PDFs, order history and ledger balances are mapped and moved. The first stage is an analysis of your current system. We tell you honestly what moves cleanly and what needs work.
Will we lose our history?
No. The staged approach exists precisely so nothing is lost: analysis, field-by-field mapping you sign off, a trial migration into a test company, parallel running, then a planned cutover with the old data preserved.
How long does a migration take?
It depends on the state of your data, and anyone who quotes a number before looking at it is guessing. The analysis stage produces a real timeline; the stages are sized so the office keeps working throughout.
Can we run both systems in parallel?
Yes. Parallel running is a formal stage, not a favour. You switch when the evidence says it's safe, not when a project plan says it's Friday.
Our data is a mess. Is that a dealbreaker?
It's normal. The mapping stage surfaces the mess, we agree cleaning rules with you, and the trial migration shows the result before anything is committed.
AI
What can the assistant actually answer?
Anything that lives in your data: stock positions, aged debt, margins, works-order status, supplier performance. It runs read-only queries against your company's schema and returns answers, tables and charts. It also explains how to use the system and can take you to the right screen.
Is our data used to train AI models?
No. Documents and queries are processed to produce your results and are not used to train models.
What happens if the AI reads a certificate wrong?
Nothing, until a person says so. Every capture is a draft for review. The heat number, grade and chemistry are shown against the source PDF before anyone confirms. The AI proposes. Your team decides.
Can the AI change our data?
Only through Act mode. It drafts a typed, listed action (create a stock code, raise a PO, book a GRN) and executes it only after you confirm. Report mode is read-only by construction.
Security & data
Where is our data hosted?
The primary database is managed Postgres in London (eu-west-2). Files like certificates and document bundles live in private storage buckets, reached only through short-lived signed links.
How is it backed up?
Automated daily database backups on Supabase, restorable to any daily snapshot. Point-in-time recovery isn't enabled yet; it's on the roadmap as we grow. Uploaded documents like certificates are held in platform object storage. We don't publish recovery-time promises we haven't tested.
Who can see our data?
Your company's users, under seven operational roles that gate what each person can do. Each company lives in its own database schema and every request is checked for membership and role. Platform administration for support is superadmin-only and audited.
If we leave, can we export everything?
Your data is yours. Structured exports are provided on exit, and GDPR data-subject export and erasure are built into the product.
Do you support multi-factor authentication?
Yes. TOTP two-factor per user, and a company can require it for everyone.
Commercial
How does pricing work?
A monthly licence per tier. Lite is £395 a month and Professional £995, both excluding VAT. Corporate is on request, for larger, multi-site or integration-led setups. You pay by the number of full-desk users; warehouse and shop-floor logins are unlimited. Every tenancy is set up with us directly, not through a self-serve checkout.
What does onboarding look like?
We provision your company, import your starting data, and invite your master admin, who then invites everyone else. Guided help and the in-app assistant carry most of the training load. New starters ask the assistant, not the veteran at the next desk.
What support do we get?
In-app help articles that match the current release, a ticket system with AI triage grounded in that same help content, and the developer behind the product rather than a call centre. Support is by email during UK business hours, on a best-efforts basis.
What are the contract terms?
A monthly subscription, paid in advance by card via Stripe. It renews automatically each term; you can cancel any time from billing settings and access runs to the end of the current term, with no refund for the remainder. We give at least 30 days' notice of any fee change. The full detail is in our Terms of Service.
Technical
Is it browser-based? What do we install?
Nothing. MetlSys runs in a modern browser; the shop floor uses a lightweight web app on tablets and phones, with QR batch labels deep-linking straight to the batch.
Does it integrate with Xero, Sage or QuickBooks?
Via clean CSV export from posting runs, covering the sales and purchase ledgers, for Xero, Sage 50, Sage 200 and QuickBooks Online. It's deliberately an auditable export rather than a live two-way sync, and we say so plainly.
What about uptime?
MetlSys runs on managed cloud infrastructure (Vercel, Railway, Supabase). We don't publish an uptime figure we can't evidence, and we don't offer a standalone uptime SLA at this stage. Anything specific would be set out in a separately signed agreement.
Is there an API?
API access comes with the Corporate tier. Talk to us about what you need to connect.
Further reading

The certificate answers above are the short version. For what each EN 10204 type actually means, who signs it, and why matching certificates to heat numbers is the part that goes wrong, read EN 10204 explained: 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 and 3.2.

On the accounting question, the accounting export page sets out exactly what the export carries and what it will never do.

Question not here?

Ask it in the demo. Awkward ones welcome. If we don't know, we'll say so and find out.