Operations dashboards
Live numbers from your real systems — jobs, cash, stock, capacity — on one screen. Not a report someone copy-pastes together every Friday and nobody quite trusts.
Replaces: the Friday copy-paste report
Internal tools shaped exactly like your business
Big companies run on custom systems built by engineering teams. You run on a fourteen-tab spreadsheet and the one person who understands it. We build the dashboards, client portals, quoting tools and admin apps that end the spreadsheet heroics — fitted to your process, fed by your real data, and owned by you.
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01 · The spreadsheet breaking point
It stopped being a file a while ago
Spreadsheets are the right prototype and the wrong production system. They’re the cheapest way ever invented to work out how your business should run — which is exactly how yours grew to fourteen tabs.
But when one spreadsheet runs your pricing, your scheduling or your inventory, it isn’t a file anymore — it’s infrastructure. And infrastructure needs what a file can’t give you: permissions, history, backups, and more than one person who can hold it.
Keep the logic. Retire the file.
Ref Failure mode Status
S-01 One formula error silently misprices 200 quotes before anyone notices. LIVE
S-02 Only one person understands tabs 7–14 — and they take vacation. LIVE
S-03 No permissions: everyone who can open it can edit everything. LIVE
S-04 No history: nobody knows who changed what, when, or why. LIVE
S-05 It lives on someone’s desktop. So, effectively, does the business. LIVE
STATUS “RETIRED” TAKES A SYSTEM — NOT ANOTHER TAB
02 · What we build
Client portals
Customers check the status of their job, order or project themselves — instead of phoning your office to ask someone to read a spreadsheet to them.
Replaces: the status calls your team answers all day
Quoting & pricing tools
Your pricing knowledge, with guardrails. Reps build accurate quotes in minutes, and the rules that protect your margin are enforced by the tool — not by memory.
Replaces: tab 7 of the pricing sheet
Admin panels
One place to edit products, jobs and inventory — with permissions deciding who can change what, and a history of every change ever made.
Replaces: emailing the master file around
One platform instead of ten
Sometimes the honest answer isn’t to connect the subscriptions — it’s to replace them. When a business is paying for eight tools that each do a fraction of the job, none of them quite fitting, one system built around how you actually work can retire most of the stack and the monthly bill with it.
Replaces: the eight logins and the licence renewals
02.1 · Connect or replace
Not everything should be connected
Most of what we build plugs into the software you already run, because ripping out working systems is expensive and rarely necessary. But “connect what you have” is a default, not a religion.
If your stack is eight overlapping subscriptions held together with exports, connecting them just makes the mess run faster. At that point the cheaper answer over three years is usually one system you own, shaped around your actual operation, with the subscriptions cancelled.
Which of the two it is comes out of the blueprint — with the maths, before you commit.
Connect
Your systems mostly work and mostly fit. The pain is that they don’t talk to each other, and people are the integration layer.
Replace
You’re paying for several tools that each cover part of the job, none properly, and the workarounds have become the process.
Both
The common one. Keep the systems that earn their place — accounting, email, the CRM your team likes — and build the missing middle yourself.
03 · Built boring, on purpose
Boring is a feature
The interesting part of an internal tool is what it does to your week — never the stack underneath it. Every build follows the same construction spec, and you get it in writing.
That’s how a tool survives in a company with no engineer on staff: nothing exotic, nothing only we understand, nothing you can’t take somewhere else.
B-01
Proven low-code platforms and plain code — whichever the blueprint justifies, never whichever is trending.
B-02
Talks to what you already run: QuickBooks or Xero, your CRM, Google Sheets, Postgres.
B-03
Permissions, audit history and backups from day one — not in phase two.
B-04
You get the code, the accounts and a handoff walkthrough when we hand over the keys.
B-05
Any competent contractor can maintain it after us — that’s a design requirement, not luck.
04 · Engagement spec
SPEC SHEET — CUSTOM INTERNAL TOOLS REV: CURRENT
- Engagement
- Free review · paid blueprint · fixed-price build
- Timeline
- Fixed in your blueprint, before you commit
- Connects to
- Accounting · CRM · Sheets · your DB
- Security
- Permissions · audit trail · backups
- Ownership
- 100% yours — code and accounts
- After launch
- Docs + training · optional care plan
05 · Questions
Fair questions,
straight answers
More detail in the no-hype guide — or ask us directly on the review call.
Why not just buy off-the-shelf software?
Often you should — if a SaaS product fits 90% of your process, buy it, and we’ll say exactly that on the review call. Custom wins in two cases: when your process is the edge — the thing you do differently that wins you work, which off-the-shelf software would force you to flatten — or when you’re already paying for five tools plus a spreadsheet to approximate the one tool you actually need.
Does it have to come with automation?
No. Plenty of projects are a tool and nothing else — a dashboard that finally shows the numbers in one place, a quoting screen that enforces your pricing rules, an admin panel that replaces emailing the master file around. The two do tend to arrive together, because once information moves reliably you want somewhere to see and steer it, but neither requires the other. If you only want the tool, that’s the project.
Can it connect to Xero / our CRM?
Yes — that’s usually the point. Most internal tools we build exist precisely to pull live data from the systems you already run: Xero or QuickBooks, your CRM, Google Sheets, your database. The blueprint includes a data-flow diagram showing which systems connect, which fields move where, and which never leave your accounts — you approve it before we build anything.
Who maintains it after launch?
Every tool ships with plain-English documentation, a handoff walkthrough for your team, and a deliberately boring stack — proven platforms and plain code that any competent contractor can pick up after us. That’s a design requirement, not luck. If you’d rather not think about it at all, a monthly care plan covers monitoring, fixes and small improvements.
How does this compare to hiring a developer?
A permanent hire is a recurring cost that starts before they’ve shipped anything, and most internal tools don’t need a permanent seat — they need a few focused weeks and a clean handoff. Our price is fixed in writing before the build starts, so you’re comparing a one-off number against a salary. The blueprint gives you that number, along with the honest answer on whether the tool is worth it at all.