Operations
Quotation-to-payment operations platform
The system we run ourselves: every enquiry tracked from first contact through quotation, contract, project, invoice and payment - with the elapsed time at each stage.
The challenge
Like most technical companies, we could build software for clients faster than we could answer basic questions about our own business: which enquiries went cold, how long a quotation actually takes to convert, what a project cost in staff time against what it billed.
Off-the-shelf tools each covered a slice and none covered the chain, so the interesting number - elapsed time from enquiry to completion - existed nowhere.
What we did
We built the chain as one lifecycle. Each stage stamps an event, so the platform can show where a deal is and how long it has been there. Project cost is computed from approved timesheet hours at a rate snapshotted onto each entry, so changing a salary never rewrites history. Quotations can be issued under different company letterheads with their own numbering, and commission for associates generates automatically from invoices.
Because it runs on ordinary shared hosting with no scheduler, derived states - expired quotations, overdue invoices, missed targets - are recalculated on page load under a throttle rather than by a cron job that would not exist.
The outcome
We run the company on it daily. Follow-ups stop being forgotten, project profitability is visible while the project is still running, and the lifecycle timing report tells us where deals actually stall. It is also the strongest reference we have for the operational software we build for others.
Planning a digitalization or an IT upgrade?
Tell us where you are - still on paper, half digital, or stuck with systems that will not talk. We will say honestly what it takes, in what order, and roughly what it costs.