Custom software development
We don’t fit you into software.
We build software around you.
Orders, production, dispatch, invoicing. The parts of your business that don’t look like anyone else’s, and the first things an off-the-shelf tool asks you to change. We build a system shaped to the way you already run them, and hand you the code when it is done.
- You own the IP
- Fixed scope
- Built around your process
In production today
- Orders
- Production
- Dispatch
- Invoicing
$5M+of orders and production a year. That is the book it was built to carry.
Eight weeks from the first commit to running their orders and their production floor.
We have not been doing this long. One system, built properly, is what there is to show.
Decisions from inside it
- Invoice numbers are handed out under a row lock, not counted from the rows that already exist. Two people raising one at the same moment cannot be given the same number.
- Money is held in cents, as whole numbers. A floating-point total is one that occasionally ends in .00000001, which is not a thing to print on an invoice.
- Tax is stored as a rate in basis points. A field that can only hold 17 or 18 quietly rounds somebody’s money the first time a rate of 17.5% turns up.
- A promised ship date is never moved to cover a delay. The date it actually shipped is recorded beside it, and the gap between the two is left standing.
How we build it
The workarounds aren’t the problem. They’re the specification.
Every spreadsheet running beside the software is a note about something the software got wrong. We read those notes as the brief, then build the system that makes them unnecessary, without asking anyone to work differently.
None of it asked you to change how you work. That is the whole method, and when it is finished it belongs to you.
Read from Fig. 1
re-keyed into the spreadsheet
The order is captured once, at intake, and production reads that same record. There is no second copy to keep in step.
photo of the whiteboard, 6am
The floor updates its own status where the work happens, so the office sees it as it changes rather than the morning after.
printed, ticked, filed in a tray
The docket is the record. It is signed off in place, and it is still findable when somebody asks about it in six months.
month-end — do these two agree?
One set of numbers, so there is nothing to reconcile. Month-end stops being a week of checking.
The case for buying
Why not off-the-shelf?
Often it is the right answer, and plenty of the conversations we have end there. If your business runs the way the software expects it to, buy the software: it is cheaper, it is faster, and somebody else keeps it running. The rest of this page is about the businesses where that stops being true.
Off the shelf
- You adapt to it. Every process that does not fit becomes a workaround, and every workaround ends up in a spreadsheet.
- You rent it. Every month, indefinitely, and you own nothing at the end of it.
- Your changes join a queue behind every other customer’s.
Built around you
- It adapts to you. The system is drawn from how you already work, so there is nothing to work around.
- You own it, once. The code, the data and the decisions are yours.
- Changes are yours to make, on your schedule.
Both are real options. The only question worth asking is which one fits the way you already work.
What you own at the end
Most software you pay for, you never own.
A subscription is rented for exactly as long as you keep paying for it. Agency work is often licensed back to you, which is the same arrangement with a different invoice attached. We do neither. The IP transfers to you, and the source code is yours.
Read it
Every line of it. Not a compiled box you are not allowed to look inside.
Change it
With us, with your own developers, or with somebody else entirely. You do not need our permission, and you do not wait in our queue.
Take it in-house
Whenever it starts to make sense. The handover is the point of the engagement, not a penalty at the end of it.
Sell it with the business
It sits on your side of the deal. Whatever the company is worth, the system is part of that rather than a licence that lapses with it.
That is the difference between a service and an asset. A service stops the month you stop paying for it.
Start here
Tell us what you’re trying to build.
A short description of how your business runs and where it is breaking is enough to start.
How the work moves now, and where it comes apart. Two or three paragraphs is plenty. You do not need a requirements document, and if one turns out to be useful we can write it together later.
A straight read on whether it is worth building at all. If you would be better off buying something off the shelf, we will say so.