Bespoke software built around how you actually work

What people actually build

Every one of these started as a spreadsheet, a clipboard or somebody’s memory.

• Job management and scheduling. What is booked, who is on it, what happened and what is outstanding. Assignment, completion and sign off, in one place.
• Vehicle and fuel tracking. Fleet records, mileage, fuel spend per vehicle, service intervals, MOT dates and the reminders that stop one being missed.
• Inspections and health and safety forms. Filled in on a phone at the site, with photos, timestamps and a signature attached. Findings raised as actions and chased until they are closed.
• Stock and assets. What is held, what is out on a job, what needs ordering and what a given van is carrying right now.
• Approvals. Anything that currently needs somebody to say yes by email. Purchase requests, time off and quotes above a threshold, with a record of who approved what and when.
• Employee records. Staff details, certifications and their expiry dates, training, holiday and performance.
• Reporting. The numbers the directors want, generated from what the business already collects rather than assembled by hand on the last Friday of the month.

Most businesses need a few of these joined together rather than all of them. Because they share one database, the inspection, the job, the van and the person who did the work are all linked, and nobody has to match them up afterwards.

What these systems are made of

The technical terms, and what each one means for the people using it.

• Role based access control. Permissions come from a person’s role rather than being set one by one. Each department and each level sees and does only what it should, so a fitter cannot open the invoicing and a new starter cannot see the directors’ figures.
• Single sign on with Microsoft Entra ID. Entra ID is the part of Microsoft 365 that holds your staff accounts. Connecting to it means one login for everything, the multi factor authentication you already use protecting this too, and leavers removed in one place. If you are not on Microsoft 365, the application gets its own secure sign in instead.
• A progressive web app with offline support. A website that installs on a phone or tablet and behaves like an app, with no app store involved. It keeps working in a basement, on a rural site or anywhere else with no signal, holds on to what was entered, and syncs when the connection comes back.
• Integrations through APIs. An API is the published way one piece of software lets another read and write its data. Most accounting packages, payment providers and calendars offer one, as does Microsoft 365, so information moves between them without anyone retyping it.
• A relational database as the single source of truth. Data held in linked tables, so a customer, a job, a vehicle and an invoice all point at each other and each exists once. No copy of the spreadsheet with FINAL in the file name sitting on somebody’s desktop.
• Audit trails. Every change recorded with who made it and when. When a figure is questioned, the answer is in the history rather than in somebody’s memory.
• Dashboards, reports and exports. Live figures for whoever is allowed to see them, and exports to Excel or CSV when your accountant or an auditor asks.
• Cloud hosting and backups. Hosted in the cloud rather than on a machine in the office, with backups taken automatically, so a stolen laptop or a flooded office does not take the business with it.
• UK GDPR. Personal data about staff and customers limited to the roles that need it, kept only as long as there is a reason to, and easy to find, export or delete when someone asks for theirs. It is built in from the start so you can meet your obligations, not bolted on afterwards.

Why these start at £5,000

Because nothing about them is off the shelf, and the honest answer to “why does it cost that” is the work that happens before anybody writes any code.

We sit down with the business and map what actually happens, which is almost never what the process document says. What information gets collected, by whom, on what. Where it goes next. Who needs to see it and who must not. What the exceptions are, because every business runs on exceptions. What has to work on a phone with no signal.

Then it is designed around that, built, tested with the people who will actually use it, and changed when they tell us what we got wrong.

A cheaper version of this exists. It is called configuring an off the shelf product, and for plenty of businesses it is the right answer. If that is your situation we will tell you, because selling somebody a bespoke build they did not need is a good way to never get a referral.

And if what you need turns out to be a form, a list and a notification, Microsoft 365 may already do it with the licences you pay for. We will point you there first.

One we run ourselves

Detailing Sanctuary, Patrick’s own mobile detailing business in Wolverhampton, runs on DS Central, an application built for it. It is the one project where we can show you everything, and it is written up on our work page.

Whatever we build for you, you own it at the end. The code, the data and the documentation.