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

The short version

Most businesses do not have a software problem.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

How a project runs

Scoped before it is priced, priced before it is built.

The reason systems work is normally quoted on application is that the same brief costs wildly different amounts in a tidy business and a messy one. The answer is not to withhold the number. It is to publish the price of finding out.

1. 1Process audit: normally £495, free for a limited timeA 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. It can still conclude “do not build this”. When an audit is paid for, the fee is credited in full against builds totalling over £2,000.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.