About
Bala means to count
Zulu and Sotho. Everything the system produces comes back to somebody having counted something, and the system never letting that record be altered. The name states the foundation rather than the ambition.
Bala was built around a working South African food factory, not around a feature list. The problem it solves came out of an afternoon on a factory floor: the information needed to answer what can be sold already exists, but it exists in three places at once, and one of those places is a person who will retire.
It is a product of Zizian (Pty) Ltd, and it is deliberately generic. No customer’s product, recipe or process lives in its code. That is what lets a factory add its fortieth product itself, on a Tuesday morning, without waiting for us.
What we hold to
Six rules we will not trade away
Nothing is editable
Not an operator, not an administrator, not us. A correction is a new entry and both stay visible for ever.
Say the number, then what it means
Not “insufficient stock”. Can make 280, limited by milk.
Never show a zero that means “I do not know”
A product with no recipe says so. Silence that looks like a measurement is how an order gets declined that could have been taken.
Legible before beautiful
The cold room decides the design, not the laptop.
Your words beat ours
Every default name can be changed, including the three figures. If you call it stock on floor, so does the system.
Overlay, do not replace
The paper stays. The batch limits stay. The way you make things stays.
Start with two weeks
A short conversation, then two weeks on your floor. At the end you have a fixed price and your factory's knowledge written down, and you owe nothing further.