Bonobo

Case study

The case

Bonobo is the market leader's core volumetric-control system: the software that today 693 clients — distributors, service stations, carriers and self-consumption operators — use to comply with what Mexico's tax authority (SAT) requires them to report on every movement of fuel: purchases from tanker trucks, retail sales, losses, and permits from CRE (the energy regulatory commission). Rafael joined the project by studying the SAT's full official documentation to understand how each section of the report had to be structured before writing a single line of code. At the station, Bonobo connects directly to the hardware through several Python projects: it reads the tank probes to determine real inventory, authorizes sales dispatch from the pump, and logs tanker-truck receiving and fuel purchases and sales. That data migrates to the cloud, where the volumetric-control JSON submitted to SAT gets assembled, alongside invoicing — including Carta Porte and global invoices issued outside their normal window — so both flows stay consistent with each other. The challenge wasn't only technical, it was about the business: every kind of client operates differently. Retailers follow the full flow, from probe to invoice; distributors operate almost entirely virtually, capturing data to generate their own JSON file; carriers are mostly virtual too, but connect to CNE and SIRACP to geolocate their units in real time; and self-consumption operators follow their own variant. Rafael had to untangle those different business rules under one system without one bleeding into another. The system runs on PHP with Yii2 and MariaDB, the stack shared by most Brentec platforms, which let him carry business knowledge over to other projects such as Central Shield and Gorila Desk. With 693 clients in operation, and clients coming and going every month, Bonobo isn't a system that's ever finished: it keeps growing, and its design had to plan for that from the start.