Building the Business System We Could Not Buy

The challenge

A professional services business generates a specific kind of paperwork — scoped proposals, phased quotes, statements of work — and the commercial tools either produce something generic or require enough configuration that you are effectively developing anyway. Meanwhile the commercial data lived across a CRM, a spreadsheet and a document folder.

Where we came in

The reason this is worth showing is not that we built an ERP. It is that we have run a real business on software we wrote, through the unglamorous parts — the document rendering that has to produce an accessible, correctly paginated PDF every time, the migrations that cannot lose data. Those are exactly the parts that decide whether a custom system survives, and we have lived with the consequences of our own decisions.

What we did

• Built the commercial core — clients, opportunities, quotes and documents — as one system of record
• Developed a document rendering pipeline that produces accessible, correctly formatted PDFs from structured content
• Exposed an API so other systems, including our public website, can create records against it
• Maintained it through hundreds of releases rather than building it once and freezing it
• Applied the same migration and testing discipline we would apply to a client's system

Where it landed

• The commercial side of the business runs on one system rather than three tools and a folder
• Every proposal and report we issue is rendered through the same documented pipeline
• Under continuous development, with the same release discipline we hold client work to