Software for Karachi businesses, built from Lahore.

Most of Pakistan’s sea freight passes through the ports in Karachi, and many of the country’s forwarders run their main office in the city. A Karachi forwarder deals with the whole mix in an ordinary week: sea and air shipments in both directions, master and house bills, containers, and charges in more than one currency on the same job.

Cargonio is our own freight ERP, and that mix is what it was designed around. Air and sea, export and import run on one job book, with shipping documents, billing, accounting, HR and payroll in the same system. The demo shipment in it runs from Karachi to Jebel Ali, a lane any forwarder near Keamari will recognise.

Two freight companies are live on Cargonio. One of them, Kare Cargo International, runs its entire business on it, from shipments and invoices to the books, HR and payroll, under one login, so the owner sees the company from one screen instead of four.

The tax side is where a Karachi company differs from a Punjab one, and it is worth being precise. Sales tax on services is handled by the provinces. Punjab has the Punjab Revenue Authority, Sindh has the Sindh Revenue Board, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has KPRA, and the federal side sits with FBR.

The tax integration built into Cargonio covers PRA and FBR e-IMS, which is what a Punjab forwarder needs. A forwarder registered in Sindh should confirm its SRB position with its tax adviser before relying on any system for tax reporting, and we will tell you plainly what Cargonio reports for you and what it leaves to your accountant.

This matters most for companies with branches in more than one province. A forwarder with desks in both Karachi and Lahore can owe different authorities on different jobs, and keeping that straight is far easier when tax is worked out on each invoice than when someone untangles a spreadsheet at the end of the month.

Karachi has a big retail scene, from the shops along Tariq Road and in Zamzama to brands that sell mostly through Instagram and their own sites. Whatever the size, an online store here has to take payment the way Pakistani customers actually pay: cash on delivery first, then bank transfers and mobile wallets such as JazzCash and Easypaisa.

Sky Fragrances, a Pakistani perfume brand, is a store we built that is live now. It ships across Pakistan and abroad, takes cash on delivery plus bank, JazzCash and Easypaisa transfers with a proof-of-payment upload, and scores 97 on Google’s mobile performance test. Their team runs the admin from a phone, and the whole shop sits on ordinary shared hosting.

For a label that wanted more, we built Rang-e-Aahan, a Pakistani women’s clothing brand, a custom platform on Next.js and Payload CMS with customer accounts, returns and store credit, and a checkout for cash on delivery and bank transfer. It is now live. Between them the two builds show the range, from a lean shop that costs little to host to a larger platform with more for customers to do.

Not every Karachi project is a shop or a shipment. The city is full of trading houses, importers, wholesalers and service firms, and many still manage customers and orders across WhatsApp groups, Excel files and an accounts package that nothing else connects to.

That is usually a web application problem: a customer portal, an order system, or a dashboard that shows the owner what is happening without waiting for a weekly report. Where staff or customers are out on the road, an iOS and Android app reads from the same backend. Alongside that we set up CRMs, automate repetitive admin with AI where it genuinely helps, and host the whole thing in the cloud.

Search is part of the build as well. A Karachi business chasing customers across a city this size needs pages that load quickly on a phone and answer what the buyer typed into Google, so speed and SEO are planned in from the first page rather than treated as a job for later.

We do not keep a Karachi office and will not rent an address to look local. Karachi projects run remotely from our engineering office in Lahore: video calls, a shared project board you can open at any time, and regular demos of working software, so you judge progress by what you can click rather than by a status email.

Working across Pakistan has practical advantages. We share your time zone, so calls happen during your working day, and the cost of a build reflects Lahore engineering, which typically comes in well under what an American agency would ask for matching work. We already work this way with clients abroad, in Kuwait, the USA and Australia, so a remote client is the normal case for us rather than the exception.

Before anything is built we agree the scope in writing and split the work into phases, each priced on its own. You keep ownership of the code and every account, and if you later bring the work in-house or move it to another team, all of it goes with you.