New in The Lab: The Creative Van Solutions Booking Platform

The Lab has a new entry: a full-stack booking and dispatch platform we built for Creative Van Solutions, a mobile mechanic service. It's a live production system, not a prototype, so we wanted the write-up to show it the way it actually runs - real screenshots from the deployed app, next to the admin tooling that keeps it running.

What the platform does

Creative Van Solutions sends mechanics on the road to service customers at scheduled stops rather than running a fixed shop. The platform is the coordination layer for that: a React + TypeScript single-page app on the front end, an Azure Functions API on the back end, and Azure Table Storage underneath.

• Customer portal: Visitors search for service near a city, address, or zip, see mechanic profiles, and browse a live map of upcoming stops.
• Mechanic Portal: A secured login for mechanics to manage their own trips, respond to leads, and (for admins) run the business end of the platform.
• GPS-based scheduling: Trips carry real coordinates and date ranges, so "upcoming stops" on the customer side and "my trips" on the mechanic side stay in sync automatically.

Inside the admin dashboard

The part of the platform customers never see is where most of the engineering effort went. The admin dashboard gives mechanics and admins tab-based control over the whole operation:

• Trip Manager: Create, edit, and mark trips as booked or available, with GPS capture built in.
• Client Inquiries: Incoming leads land here in real time, each tagged with a status (New, Followed Up, Pending Approval, Approved, Closed) that the mechanic can move through the pipeline.
• Mechanics: Add or remove mechanic accounts and see who's active on the platform.
• System Settings: This is the configuration screen proper - SMTP host, port, credentials, and from-address for email notifications, plus the list of service types (Mechanical, Electrical, Installs, and so on) that populate the customer-facing inquiry form. Change a setting here and it takes effect immediately for every customer.

That last piece is what makes the platform genuinely self-service. Nobody has to file a ticket with us to change the outbound email account or add a new service category - it's a form in the dashboard, backed directly by Table Storage.

Trips, mechanics, and leads at a glance

The rest of the dashboard follows the same philosophy: give the operator direct, real-time control instead of routing changes through us.

Why it's in The Lab

The Lab is where we showcase the architecture and engineering patterns behind Huntoso's active projects - not just the finished product, but how it's put together. The Creative Van Solutions booking platform earns its spot as a reference for a pattern we reuse often: a lightweight React front end backed by serverless Functions, with an admin surface that lets the business owner configure everything - notifications, categories, scheduling - without touching code.

Check out the full entry, with the live and admin screenshots side by side, on The Lab.