Custom Operations Platform Replacing Spreadsheets at a Services Firm

Summary

This is a class of project we do several times a year, described without a client name because the engagement is under NDA. A professional services firm, forty to eighty people, has grown past what spreadsheets can carry. Quotes live in one workbook, the schedule in another, invoices in a third, and the truth about any client sits in someone's inbox. Off-the-shelf tools were tried and abandoned because none of them fit the way the firm actually sells and delivers. They need custom software, they want a fixed price, and they are frightened of a system the staff will refuse to use.

The Challenge

Nobody at the firm can write a requirements document, and they should not have to. The knowledge is in the heads of the operations manager, two account leads and the bookkeeper, and in the formulas of the spreadsheets themselves. The previous vendor quoted by the hour off a two-page brief and stopped at month five with a half-built system nobody logged into. The partners want a number they can approve once, and they want the eleven spreadsheets gone by the end of the year without a single missed invoice in between.

The Solution

Scoping by shadowing, not by workshop

We do not ask the firm to describe their process. Two of our analysts sit with the operations manager and the account leads for a week and watch a quote become a job, a job become a schedule, and a schedule become an invoice. Every spreadsheet formula is read and written down as a rule. At the end of the week the client receives a scope document: the twelve workflows the platform has to carry, the four it deliberately will not, the reports the partners actually read, and the integrations that matter (accounting package, calendar, e-signature). That document belongs to the client. The fixed price for the build is put on it, and that number is the invoice.

Building in the order the money flows

• Quoting first. The quote builder replaces the pricing workbook in the first six weeks, because it is the workflow every client touches and the one the partners check daily. The old workbook stays as a read-only reference until three months of quotes have gone through the new system without a correction.
• Scheduling and delivery second. Jobs, people, dates and the hand-offs between them, with the calendar integration the account leads asked for on day two of shadowing.
• Invoicing last, because it touches the accounting package and the bookkeeper's month-end. It goes live on the first day of a quarter, with a parallel run against the old invoice sheet for one full cycle.
• Reports the partners already read, rebuilt in Power BI on the platform's data, so that the first Monday after go-live looks familiar rather than new.

Adoption is part of the scope

Software that replaces spreadsheets fails when it is imposed. Each workflow is released to the two or three people who own it, with a screen recording made for them and a week where our engineer sits in their channel. The operations manager, not us, presents each slice to the rest of the firm. Feedback in that first week is absorbed inside the fixed price, because it is not a change of scope; it is the scope being understood.

How the fixed price holds

The scope document lists what is out as carefully as what is in. When the partners asked for a client portal in month four, they received a short written quote for it as a separate phase, approved it, and the original number did not move. The weekly report shows effort by workflow as information, not as an invoice.

What This Delivers

• One system where a quote, its job, its schedule and its invoice are the same record, with the spreadsheets retired one workflow at a time.
• A repository and an Azure subscription in the firm's name from the first commit, infrastructure as code, and a runbook their IT contractor can follow.
• Staff who use the platform because they were shown it by their own manager, in the order they needed it.
• Thirty days of fixes after the last workflow goes live, inside the fixed price. Support quoted afterwards, when the firm knows what it needs.

Technologies and Tools

React, TypeScript, .NET 8, ASP.NET Core, PostgreSQL, Azure App Service, Azure Blob Storage, Power BI, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Playwright.

The scoping workbook and the plan generator we use on projects like this are public: github.com/INNERLUXES/scope-to-plan. Service page: custom software development services.