Building AquaOps: The Livestock Operations System Behind April's Aquarium

April's Aquarium is a livestock shop in South Vancouver that sells freshwater fish, shrimp and snails in store and online through Shopify. Every batch that comes in moves through receiving, quarantine, treatment when it's needed, and finally the shop floor.

We started by auditing the shop's entire operation, from the moment a shipment lands to the moment a fish is sold. With that map in hand, we designed and built AquaOps from scratch, a custom operations application the team now runs the store on.

The shop's knowledge lived in five written procedures and in the heads of its senior staff: which food goes to which tanks, how long each species holds in quarantine, which fish land straight into salt, how much water can come out of a shrimp tank. No system enforced any of it. It happened if the person on shift remembered.

Discovery meant shadowing a full operating cycle and running workflow sessions with each person involved, from the owner to the aquarists on the floor. Losses were being counted without knowing which shipment they came from. Water tests had nowhere to be recorded. Medication doses were worked out in people's heads and never written down. Shopify stock drifted away from what was actually in the tanks.

Reducing livestock loss was the reason the project started, and the shop had no reliable way to measure it.

We built AquaOps as a mobile-friendly app for the shared iPads in the store, with every operational action tied to a staff PIN and written to an activity history. Delivery runs in stages so the team works in the new system while the next piece is built.

Shopify foundation. Before building anything that touched stock, we confirmed API access, the store's location model, product and SKU matching, and how inventory moves, then settled the sync approach. Logging a loss in AquaOps now updates live Shopify inventory.

Release 1, the daily round. A tank and location registry covering front and back of house, staff roster, PIN sign-in, the round walk with all-clear, dead livestock logging with valued loss, tank flags and notes, undo, and a history ledger.

Release 2, operations and treatment. A current-day workspace, the remaining round types such as feeding, medication and water changes, handoffs and follow-up tasks, and symptom-guided treatment with dosage and treatment history.

Release 3, receiving and inventory. Shipments, invoice lines, DOA and shortfall capture, supplier claim reports, and controlled movement of cleared livestock from quarantine to the shop floor, synced to Shopify.

The code lives in a GitHub organization and an AWS account owned by April's Aquarium, so the shop owns its software outright and isn't tied to us to keep it running.

Release 1 went live in the store at the end of October 2026, five weeks after kickoff. Staff now walk their rounds and log losses on in-store iPads against live Shopify stock. Releases 2 and 3 follow through the winter, with full handover targeted for early 2027.

For the first time, every loss is recorded against a tank, a person and a dollar value, which gives the shop a baseline to measure livestock longevity against.