The workbook that breaks when two people open it.
Every company we meet has one of these. It runs dispatch, or pricing, or the schedule, and it has grown for nine years into something exactly one person fully understands. It is not a bad spreadsheet. It is a spreadsheet doing the job of a system, without accounts, without a history, and without a version the crew can use in a van. This is the work of turning it into the tool it has been pretending to be.
The rest of what separates the tool from the workbook is not a quantity and is not drawn here: accounts, two people in it at once, and a full read of everything while the van has no signal, with writes queued and reconciled on reconnect.
Six things, and what each one actually gets you.
Custom app development
The same records the workbook holds, with accounts, permissions and a history on every field. Nobody has to remember not to sort the sheet while somebody else is typing in it.
UI/UX design
Two views of one set of records, drawn for two different jobs. The office gets the board it needs. The crew never sees a table, and everything they touch is 48px high because they are wearing gloves.
iOS and Android development
On the phones your people already carry rather than hardware you have to buy, and usually as a web app they install from a link, because an App Store review queue is a bad place to keep a bug fix waiting. Mid-range Android on a weak signal is the device this actually gets used on, so it is the one the build is judged against.
Integrations with what you already run
A job that gets invoiced should end up in your accounting package without anyone rekeying it, and the schedule the office changes should be the schedule the crew sees. Whatever will not connect, you hear about in week zero rather than in week eight.
QA and testing
Including the case nobody demos: two people editing the same job, one of them in a basement with no bars. Full read offline, writes queued locally, reconciled on reconnect, and a test that proves it.
Support and maintenance
Available and optional. The thing runs in your own cloud account either way, your data exports to CSV and Parquet whenever you want it, and nothing stops working if you stop paying us.
$18,000 to $40,000 to build, and you own it.
| Build | $18,000 to $40,000 depending on how much the workbook does, fixed price |
|---|---|
| Running | $60 to $220 a month, on your own cloud account |
| Us, after | $0. No retainer and no licence. Support is there if you want it, priced per piece of work |
| Not included | Rugged devices, if you decide you want them, and any per-seat licence you do not already hold. Everything else is in the fixed price |
We read the workbook
Every sheet, including the four nobody mentions and the one with the hidden columns. The rules living in somebody's head come out of it here, and that is usually the most valuable week of the project.
The office view first, beside the sheet
The workbook stays in use the whole time. Nothing is migrated until the new thing has held the same week of real work and produced the same answers, twice.
The crews, on their own phones
The field view ships after the office one, and it ships to the people who will actually hold it in the rain. Week nine is a week of both running together before the sheet is made read only.
The ones that decide it.
The spreadsheet works. Why replace it?
What happens to nine years of history in it?
Our crews are not technical and half of them dislike change.
Why is this more than an off-the-shelf app?
Tell us what the app has to do.
Describe the work it should take over, who will use it, and what does that job today: a spreadsheet, paper, or nobody. We will reply with how we would build it and what we would need from you.