Business systems

The system your business runs on, built to fit it.

Custom business software, workflow automation and the integrations that join them to what you already use. One practice, one price, one person accountable for the whole chain.

A business system is the joined-up version of what most companies already have in pieces: a website that brings work in, software the team works inside, and the automation that carries information between them without anybody retyping it. Werehouse Media designs and builds all three. Custom business software means bespoke applications built around a company’s own process: client portals, internal dashboards, CRM interfaces, enquiry and case management, document collection, booking and intake systems, calculators and reporting screens. From £4,500, with multi-module or regulated work reaching five figures. Workflow automation means removing the repetitive work between systems: enquiry routing and qualification, document collection and chasing, reminders, task creation, CRM synchronisation, reporting and AI-assisted extraction, from £650 for a single automation and £1,950 for a connected system spanning several tools. Integration means joining the software a business already pays for through its APIs, from £1,950, rather than moving it onto a new platform. Every systems project starts with a £495 process audit that produces a written scope and a fixed price, credited in full against any build over £2,000, and which frequently concludes that an off-the-shelf product is the better answer. The client owns the code, the data and the accounts outright.

Discuss a system → What it costs

The short version

Most businesses do not have a software problem.

They have a joining problem. The information already exists. It is sitting in an inbox, a spreadsheet, an accounting package and somebody’s head, and the cost of that is a person moving it between them by hand, several times a day, getting it slightly wrong occasionally, and being the only one who knows where anything got to.

That is what a business system fixes. Not a platform you migrate onto and not a licence you rent. A set of pieces built or joined so that a fact is entered once and turns up everywhere it is needed: on the website the customer sees, in the screen the team works in, in the reminder that goes out three days later, and in the report at the end of the month.

The pieces are ordinary. What makes them worth commissioning is that they are shaped around how your business actually works rather than how a software company assumed it would.

The honest version of the pitch

There is no shortage of companies selling “digital transformation”. What is actually being sold here is narrower and more boring: specific screens for specific jobs, wired to the software you already pay for, at a price agreed in writing before anybody starts. If a spreadsheet is genuinely coping, we will say so.

How the pieces fit

Customer in, customer out.

This is the chain almost every business runs, whether or not it has been designed. In most companies the middle four stages are a person. Here is what each one is when it is built properly.

1 Customer

Somebody needs something

They find you in search, or somebody sends them. They are comparing you against two others, on a phone, and deciding quickly.

2 Website

A structured enquiry

Not a message box. A form that asks the questions you would have asked on the phone, so what arrives is already usable.

3 Automation

Qualified and routed

Scored against your own rules, checked against existing records, assigned to an owner and acknowledged, before anyone reads it.

4 Application

The internal screen

Every live job, its stage, its owner and the next action, in a system built on your fields rather than a product’s.

5 Portal

The customer self-serves

Documents, forms, approvals and progress handled by the customer in their own login, instead of a thread of attachments.

6 Automation

The chasing happens

Missing items requested, quiet quotes followed up, deadlines escalated, tasks created, all by email, SMS or WhatsApp.

7 Team

People do the actual work

The judgement, the conversation and the craft. Which is what you hired them for, and the only part of this chain worth a salary.

8 Back round

And the customer knows

Updated without having to ask, and recorded so the next enquiry from them starts with what you already know. Then it begins again.

You do not have to build all eight. Most projects start with one weak link, usually stage 3 or stage 6, because those are the ones that cost a person their week. The rest gets added when there is a reason to.

What we build

The parts list.

In the words a business would use. If the thing you need is on this list, it is a build. If it is not, ask. The list is what has come up most often, not a menu.

01 Customer-facing

What the outside world touches.

Client and customer portals
Booking and intake systems
Structured enquiry and quote journeys
Document upload and e-signature flows
Status pages and customer dashboards
Calculators and pricing tools
Application and onboarding forms

02 Internal

What your team works inside.

Operational dashboards
CRM interfaces on your own stages
Enquiry, job and case management
Admin and back-office platforms
Reporting and management screens
Scheduling and resource planning
Approval and sign-off workflows

03 Automated

Work nobody should still be doing.

Lead routing, scoring and qualification
Document collection and chasing
Quote and invoice follow-up
Reminders, escalations and notifications
Task creation from a trigger
Data synchronisation between systems
AI-assisted reading, extraction and sorting

04 Connected

What it plugs into.

REST and webhook APIs
CRM: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce
Accounting: Xero, QuickBooks, Sage
Email, SMS and WhatsApp
Calendars, phone systems and forms
Payment and e-signature providers
Whatever else the business already pays for

We work with the software you already have. Replacing a working system is expensive, slow and usually unnecessary, and a migration is the fastest way to turn a six-week project into a six-month one. Where a tool genuinely does not fit we will say so, and sometimes the recommendation is a different off-the-shelf product rather than anything we build. Systems integration

Worked example · illustrative

What we would build for a commercial finance firm.

Taking one industry all the way through, because the shape of a system is easier to judge on a specific business than an abstract one. This is a design, not a case study. We have not built this particular system for a commercial finance firm; it is written out in full so somebody in that trade can tell in two minutes whether we understand the job.

1The website enquiry becomes a funding questionnaireInstead of “tell us about your requirement”, the form asks the things a broker needs before they can do anything: trading history, turnover band, facility type, amount, timescale, security, adverse credit. Conditional, so an asset finance enquiry never sees the bridging questions.
2The answers are scored against your lending criteriaNot a generic lead score. Your rules: which lenders will look at a two-year-old limited company, what turnover floor applies to which facility, what disqualifies an enquiry outright. Out of criteria gets a polite, immediate answer rather than three days of silence.
3A CRM record is created from the same submissionEvery answer lands as a field, not as a pasted email body. Deduplicated against existing clients and introducers, tagged with source and campaign, and assigned to whoever handles that facility type.
4The document checklist generates itselfAn asset finance case asks for different paperwork than a commercial mortgage. The checklist is derived from the answers and sent within minutes, while the enquirer is still interested, rather than after somebody has read the email and worked out which template to use.
5The client uploads into their own portalBank statements, filed accounts, ID, proof of address: the lot goes into a login with a progress bar, not an email thread with a 25MB attachment limit. They can see exactly what is outstanding without ringing to ask.
6The internal deal dashboard shows every caseStage, lender, owner, value, what it is waiting on and how long it has been waiting. The question “where is the Henderson case?” has an answer on a screen instead of in somebody’s inbox.
7Tasks and reminders are created, not rememberedDocuments outstanding after four days get chased. A case with no movement in a fortnight escalates. A lender deadline creates a task for the right person with the right context attached.
8Reporting assembles itselfPipeline by stage, conversion by source and introducer, average time to offer, and where cases actually stall. Refreshed on a schedule rather than rebuilt in a spreadsheet on the last Friday of the month.

1Process audit: £495, fixedA working session and a written document: what happens now, where the time actually goes, what should be built, what should be bought off the shelf, what should be left alone, and what each option would cost. Credited in full against any build over £2,000. It is paid so that “do not build this” is a conclusion it can honestly reach.
2A fixed quote in writingScope, stages, dependencies, what you need to provide and what it costs. Not an estimate that drifts. If scope changes later it changes in writing with a number attached, agreed before the work happens rather than invoiced after it.
3Built in stages you can stop afterThe piece that pays back fastest is built first, and it goes live before the next one starts. You are never eleven weeks into something with nothing running, and you can stop at the end of any stage with a working system rather than a half-finished one.
4Tested with your data, not sample dataA system that works on three tidy examples is not a system. Real records, real edge cases, and the awkward ones your team already knows about get used before anything is signed off.
5Handover, documentation and accessWritten documentation of what runs, when, and what to do when something fails. Everything runs on your accounts and your logins. You get the code, the data and the credentials.
6Support on the same terms as everything elseMonitoring and changes from £49 a month, no contract, cancellable. It is not a condition of the build and the system does not stop working if you stop paying for it.

What it costs

Published, like everything else here.

A website and an operational system are different sizes of job and it does not help anybody to pretend otherwise. These are starting prices; what moves them is scope, and you will be told which parts of the scope are moving it before you agree to anything.

Business systems prices
What	From	When it is the right one
Process audit	£495	Always first, before any build is quoted. Credited in full against a build over £2,000.
Single automation	£650	One job, one path, and the systems it touches are already in one place.
Connected system	£1,950	Several workflows sharing data across two or three tools, including the integration work.
Systems integration	£1,950	Existing software joined through its APIs so the data moves without a person in the middle.
Bespoke application	£4,500	A portal, dashboard or internal tool with its own data model and interface.
CRM or ERP build	£4,500	A system of record: your stages, your fields, your reporting, rather than a product bent to fit.
Complex or regulated	Five figures	Multi-module, heavy integration, or work with a compliance regime attached.
Reporting & dashboards	£1,950	The figures you check weekly, on one screen, refreshed without anybody rebuilding them.
Website to go with it	£995	Where the system starts at the enquiry, the site is part of the build rather than a separate purchase.
Monitoring & changes	£49/month	Anything live that needs watching. Optional, no contract, not a condition of anything.

For comparison, UK agencies ranking on bespoke CRM terms typically advertise from £15,000 and most will not quote a £4,500 build at all, because the account manager and project manager alone would eat the fee. A general freelancer will quote it and frequently cannot deliver it. The £2,500–£8,000 band is real demand with very few credible suppliers in it, and that is deliberately where this sits.

Who this suits

When it is worth doing

•A repetitive process is measurably eating somebody’s week, and you can name it.
•The same information is being typed into more than one system.
•Enquiries or quotes are being lost because nobody followed them up in time.
•Off-the-shelf software nearly fits, and the gap is costing more than the licence.
•Customers keep ringing to ask for a status you could just show them.
•You are growing and the answer to more volume is currently “hire another administrator”.

When it does not

When we would tell you not to

•The volume does not justify it. Four quotes a month is not an automation problem.
•The process is still changing every fortnight. Build it after it settles, not before.
•An off-the-shelf product genuinely does the job. We will help you set it up instead.
•The underlying problem is that nobody agrees what the process is. That is not software.
•You want a large team, a named account manager and a formal procurement structure.
•It has to be live in a fortnight. It will not be, and we would rather say so now.

Buyers whose procurement process needs a security, accessibility and continuity position will find it on the capabilities page.

The parts of it

Each of these has its own page.

This page is the map. Every service below has the detail, the prices and the questions people actually ask.

Bespoke applications

Portals, dashboards and internal tools built on your own process and your own data model.

From £4,500

CRM & ERP systems

A system of record built round your stages and records rather than a product you bend to fit.

From £4,500

Business process automation

The retyping, the chasing and the reporting handled, so work stops waiting on somebody being free.

From £650

Systems integration

The tools you already pay for, joined so the data moves without a person in the middle.

From £1,950

Enquiry & document automation

What happens after the form is submitted: routing, acknowledgement, chasing and the record it leaves.

From £650

Data, reporting & dashboards

The numbers a business already holds, in one place, defined once, so reporting stops disagreeing with itself.

Audit £495

Websites sit alongside all of this rather than under it. See bespoke web design, or the full service list.

Straight answers

The questions buyers ask.

Read all the answers

What is a business system, in plain terms?

The joined-up version of what a business already has in pieces: the website that brings work in, the software the team works inside, and the automation that carries information between them. Built as one thing, a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Bought separately, a person moves it between them by hand.

How much does custom business software cost in the UK?

Here, a single automation starts at £650, a connected system spanning several tools at £1,950, and a bespoke application with its own data model and interface at £4,500. Multi-module or regulated builds reach five figures. Every project starts with a £495 process audit that produces a written scope and a fixed price, credited in full against any build over £2,000. Published UK guidance puts a genuinely simple single-pipeline CRM at £2,000 to £5,000 and mid-tier builds at £8,000 to £25,000, and agencies ranking on these terms commonly advertise from £15,000.

Do we have to move off the software we already use?

Almost never, and we will argue against it. Most of what looks like a software problem is a joining problem: the data exists, it is trapped in systems that do not speak to each other. We integrate through the APIs of the tools you already pay for. Where a product genuinely does not fit, the audit says so, and the recommendation is sometimes a different off-the-shelf product rather than anything we build.

What is the difference between automation and integration?

Integration moves the data. Automation changes the process. Joining your website to your CRM so an enquiry arrives as a record is integration. Deciding which enquiries are worth chasing, chasing them on a schedule and escalating the ones that go quiet is automation. Most projects need both, which is why they are quoted together.

Do we own what you build?

Yes. The code, the data and the accounts. Automations run on your logins rather than ours and are documented, so they keep running whether or not we are still involved. It is not a licence, there is no per-seat fee, and nothing stops working if you stop paying us. Where a third-party product is part of the system, you hold that account and pay that vendor directly.

How long does a build take?

A single automation is usually days. A connected system is weeks. A bespoke application is weeks to a few months depending on how many screens and how much integration it involves. Work is built in stages that each go live on their own, so you are never a long way in with nothing running. A realistic date comes with the fixed quote after the audit, not before it.

Should we use AI for this?

For some of it. Reading an unstructured email or a scanned document and turning it into fields, classifying enquiries, summarising a long thread. Those are jobs a language model does well and a rule cannot. Choosing that tool, setting it up and training people on it is AI integration. Routing, scoring against fixed criteria, chasing and reporting are better done with ordinary logic, because it is cheaper, faster and it behaves the same way every time. Anything a regulator expects a human to sign stays with a human. Most of the return in a systems project comes from the boring half.

Next step

Tell us where the week goes.

Describe the process that is costing you the most time and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth building something, buying something, or leaving alone. That conversation is free; the written answer is the £495 audit.

Discuss a system → Scope one in seven questions →