A network, not just a website

Solynth is the public face of a growing collaboration network: stories, essays, AI-assisted investigations, technology experiments, ventures, family projects, creative work, media, and practical business ideas.

The purpose is not to make every contributor the same, but to give very different people a shared place to build, test, explain, publish, and connect their work. The network is the incubator. The projects are the evidence.

The business

Oficina Caracol is an independent automotive workshop trading under the line mecânica confiável — reliable mechanics. It handles the kind of work any general garage takes on: diagnostics, servicing, repairs, and parts — and, importantly, it comes to you, offering house calls and mobile callouts rather than only bench work at a fixed unit. Bookings and enquiries go through 969 210 049.

Its brand mark is a turbo-snail — a turbocharger given a snail's eyes and a shell — a double wink at the name (caracol is Portuguese for snail) and at the nickname mechanics give the turbo itself. The joke writes itself: a snail that happens to be very, very fast.

ERPNext as the automotive Job Card System

ERPNext is a mature open-source ERP built on the Frappe framework, covering accounting, stock, sales, purchasing, CRM, scheduling, and maintenance in one connected system. For a workshop, that general-purpose machinery becomes the backbone of a job-card system: each vehicle that arrives becomes a job card with an owner, a registration, a reported fault, and a status; parts are drawn from tracked stock; labour and parts roll into a quotation and then an invoice; and the history of every car stays on file for the next visit.

This is the same job-card idea demonstrated in the Solynth Jira space, but carried through to a full operational ledger rather than a ticket board. Jira shows the workflow concept; ERPNext runs the business behind it — customers, vehicles, parts, money, and repair history in a single trail from first call to closed job.

Setting it up — where the build is

The instance runs on Frappe Cloud, the official hosted home for ERPNext, which handles provisioning, upgrades, backups, and monitoring — so the workshop gets a maintained system without anyone running a server. On top of that, configuration is underway: an ERPNext company set up for Portugal in euros, and the everyday records a garage lives on — service items (oil change, brakes, diagnostics, timing belt), stock items for parts, suppliers, customers, and warehouses.

The shape of the system is a deliberate choice rather than an off-the-shelf module. ERPNext's built-in Job Card is really a manufacturing-floor document — it hangs off Work Orders, Operations, and Workstations — so instead of bending the heavyweight Manufacturing module around a repair bay, the Job Card is being repurposed and a customer-facing vehicle record added alongside it. That vehicle record is custom on purpose: ERPNext does ship a native Vehicle master, but it belongs to Fleet Management and is built around fuel logs, trips, and an assigned employee, not a car's repair history. One wrinkle already met along the way: since version 14, ERPNext's HR lives in a separate Frappe HR (HRMS) app, so registering mechanics as employees means installing that app first.

Still to build: an interactive SVG vehicle diagram where tapping a panel or component sets a condition marker — good, in progress, needs repair, waiting for parts, declined — with before-and-after photos annotated and saved straight onto the job card, a customer portal for booking, approval, payment, and service history, and AI-assisted inspection suggestions the mechanic confirms or edits. The longer-term aim is to package all of this as a reusable garage app on ERPNext rather than a one-off customisation, so it could serve other workshops too. These parts are designed, not yet deployed.