How to Automate FastBound

The bound book follows the serial number, not the sale

FastBound is electronic acquisition and disposition software for federal firearms licensees: the bound book, kept in a browser instead of a ledger. Some shops write it as two words, and the company has been building nothing else since 2010.

What lives in it is every firearm that has arrived and every one that has left, by serial, with the contact it came from and the contact it went to. Separate books can be kept for consignment, transfers, gunsmithing, NFA and pawn. When another FastBound dealer disposes to you, the acquisition arrives already filled out, waiting to be reviewed and accepted.

Every employee gets a login, and the audit trail records who did what and when. It runs on any Mac, PC or tablet with a browser, so the book reads the same at the counter as it does in the back room.

Nothing around the book ever tells the book anything

The book is one screen. What has to go into it arrives from six other places.

A pallet comes in from a distributor with a packing slip that does not quite match the invoice PDF sitting in the inbox. The POS says nine of a model are on hand and the book has eleven open. A customer's transfer landed on Tuesday and nobody has told him. A repair has been on the bench three weeks, and the owner last heard anything at drop-off. A consignment gun sold in June and the seller has not been paid. An acquisition from February still has nothing beside it in the disposition column.

Each of those is answered the same way: open a second window, put two lists next to each other, and read down them.

FastBound

Serials still waiting on a disposition Acquisitions that have sat open the longest, ranked and put in front of somebody before the shop gets busy.

Two systems, one honest comparison The on-hand list from the POS set against the open serials in the book, with only the lines that disagree written down.

Buyers and owners left in the dark Landed transfers, repairs past the promised turnaround and consignments sold but unpaid, each drafted as a short message for a person to send.

FastBound warns about what you typed, not about what arrived

The book itself is well served. Compliance warnings flag an entry that does not look right as you acquire or dispose. Bulk change corrects a mistyped caliber or the wrong contact across thousands of items at once, and bulk acquire and dispose handle a pallet with sequential serial generators and spreadsheet import. Integrated EZ Check verifies an FFL number against the ATF's EZ Check database, and autocomplete fills in the license number, expiry and address. There is an electronic 4473 with signature capture, NICS Direct, a stolen gun search against the NCIC file, barcode scanning and printing, automated backups, and an open API that connects dozens of POS, ERP and e-commerce systems.

The company is unusually plain about what it is not. Its own homepage says it does not sell point of sale, does not process payments and does not operate retail platforms, and that focus is the reason shops choose it.

So the packing slip, the distributor's dealer site, the courier tracking page, the gunsmith's job list and the shared inbox all sit outside it. Every one of them holds something the book is waiting on, and none of them will ever tell it.

A serial in one system and not the other is findable today

None of that comparing needs anybody's judgement. It needs two lists side by side, early enough that what disagrees can still be sorted out.

Yesterday's receipts on a distributor's dealer site, lined up against the acquisitions logged in the book, so a serial that came in the box but never got entered is found while the box is still in the back room. The on-hand list out of the POS set against the open serials, with only the disagreements printed. Acquisitions carrying no disposition, sorted oldest first, so the one from February is a question asked this week rather than next year.

The people waiting are a list as well. The transfer customer whose rifle landed on Tuesday. The repair that has run past the turnaround somebody promised at drop-off. The consignment seller whose gun sold and whose payment has not gone out, checked against what the accounts package shows.

None of that writes in the book. A run produces the disagreements and a draft of what somebody might say, and the entry itself stays with a person who is answerable for it.

Reading the book is a task, and keeping it is a person's job

That last part is the whole design. Reading is safe to hand over. The record is not, and it should never be.

WebRun is an AI agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens FastBound, a distributor's dealer site, your POS or a courier's tracking page, reads what each one says and reports where they disagree.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it part way. It is set up to read rather than write: nothing is acquired, disposed or edited by the agent, and no message to a customer goes out until a member of staff has read it.

Each workflow below lists the pages it opens and the point where it stops and waits for you.