01 — Build
Most business software is bought, then worked around. We start from how the work is done now — the real sequence, the exceptions, the bits held together by one person who knows — and build the system that fits it.
The system your business actually runs on: the records, the stages, the approvals and the exceptions that everyone currently holds in their head. Built as one application instead of four tools and a spreadsheet holding them together.
The screens your team uses every day. Usually the fastest thing to justify commercially, because the time being lost is measurable before we write anything — and the people who feel it can tell you exactly where it goes.
Status, documents, history, requests, invoices. A portal removes a category of inbound work rather than making it faster, and it usually changes how a customer feels about the relationship as much as how long it takes.
Your CRM, accounts package, email, storage and payment provider talking to each other properly. We are not trying to replace them — the goal is to stop a person being the integration layer between them.
Reporting that comes from the systems rather than from somebody exporting four files on the last Friday of the month. Where a report currently takes a day to produce, that day is the business case.
Where the business logic actually lives. Designed so that a second application, a mobile view or a partner integration can be added later without rewriting the first one.
Routing, approvals, reminders, document generation, scheduled jobs. We will tell you when a step should stay manual — automating a process nobody has agreed on yet just makes the disagreement faster.
The part of a replacement project that is always underestimated. Real data is inconsistent, half-duplicated and full of exceptions somebody understood in 2019 — cleaning it and moving it is often a larger job than building the screens it lands in. It is also what decides adoption: a system that starts empty gets used alongside the spreadsheet rather than instead of it.
02 — Secure
Security is decided by hundreds of small choices made while building: what a route checks, where a secret lives, what a support user can see. Doing it at the end means finding out which of those choices were wrong.
Sessions, password handling, multi-factor where it belongs, and a permission model that matches the org chart rather than one that grants everyone everything because it was quicker.
Input handling, authorisation on every route rather than only on the screen that shows the button, data separation between customers, secrets kept out of the code, and the standard classes of web vulnerability checked rather than assumed.
Most software does not become insecure through a dramatic breach. It becomes insecure by sitting still for three years while its dependencies accumulate published vulnerabilities that nobody is watching for.
Error and uptime monitoring so a failure is noticed by us rather than reported by a customer, plus backups that have actually been restored from at least once — an untested backup is a belief, not a plan.
Most spreadsheet processes have no history at all, so a wrong figure is discovered with no way of finding out how it got there. Recording changes as they happen turns that into a question with an answer — and it is the thing that makes a system safe to give more people access to, rather than guarding it by keeping the number of users small.
03 — Improve
The version of your business that exists in twelve months is not the one we build for today. Software that nobody is maintaining does not stay still; it slowly stops matching the company using it.
Bugs fixed, questions answered, small changes made. The alternative is the pattern most businesses know well: the person who built it has moved on, and every change now starts with a fortnight of someone reading unfamiliar code.
A monthly cycle rather than a rebuild every three years. The system keeps pace with how you work, and the cost is a known number rather than an occasional capital project.
Slow pages, slow reports and the shortcuts taken under deadline. Debt is not a moral failing — it is a decision that was correct at the time and needs paying down before it starts setting the pace of everything else.
Hosting, domains, certificates, scaling and what it all costs. Set up in accounts that are yours and billed to you, with us as a user you can remove — nobody should be in a position where leaving their supplier means losing their production environment. Most systems this size cost less to run each month than people expect, and we will tell you the number before you commit to it.
Engagement
Published so you can work out roughly where you sit before speaking to anyone. These are ranges from experience, not a price list — the number for your project comes out of the design stage, in writing, before any development starts.
We would rather tell you a project is too small for us, or that the thing you are describing is a £4,000 problem rather than a £40,000 one, in the first conversation.
Scope
We build marketing pages when they are part of a system we are already building. A standalone brochure site is better and cheaper from a studio that does only that.
We build securely and review our own work honestly. If you need an independent test with a certificate at the end, commission one — and we will fix what it finds.
We take responsibility for outcomes rather than supplying developers into someone else’s process. Different service, different suppliers.