OPS
Operations and back-office systems
The unglamorous system nobody demos and everybody depends on.
The short version
The platform your team lives in all day. Suppliers, jobs, staff, documents, margins, reporting — shaped around how you actually work rather than a generic template.
Every growing company reaches a point where the spreadsheet that ran the business becomes the thing holding it back. Four people editing it, one person who understands the formulas, and no way to tell what changed or who changed it.
What is included
Concretely, this is the work.
- Job, order and case management modelled on your actual workflow and terminology
- Supplier and inventory records with costs, terms, contacts and documents in one place
- Role-based access so finance, operations and sales see what they should and no more
- Document handling — contracts, passports, vouchers, invoices — stored with permissions and retention rules
- Approval chains and audit trails showing who changed what, when, and what it was before
- Reporting built around the decisions being made, not a wall of charts nobody reads
- Migration from the existing spreadsheets, carefully, with the old version kept until you trust the new one
Approach
What you should expect to change
- Hours a week returned to the people doing the work
- One version of the truth, with a history of how it got there
- Reporting that arrives without someone building it by hand every Friday
How we build operations systems
We sit with the people who will use it. Not the owner describing the process, though we need that too — the person actually doing it at four in the afternoon with a customer on hold. That is where the real process lives, and it is almost never the documented one.
Adoption is the risk, not the build
An operations system that the team works around is worse than the spreadsheet, because now there are two sources of truth. We design for the fastest possible path through the most common task, ship a narrow first version to a few users, and widen it once they are asking for more rather than avoiding it.
The spreadsheet stays
We never switch a business off its existing process on a date. Both run in parallel until the new one has been right for long enough that nobody is opening the old one.
Questions about operations and back-office systems
We have already tried this once and it failed. Why would this be different?
Usually because the first attempt was designed from a requirements document rather than from watching the work, and shipped in one large release that arrived wrong. We ship narrow, early and in front of real users, which means we find out we are wrong in week three rather than month five.
Can it work alongside the software we already pay for?
Yes, and it usually should. Accounting, payroll and email are solved problems. We integrate rather than replace them.
Also
Other things we build.
AI agents and workflow automation
Agents that carry a whole process end to end — reading the enquiry, checking availability, drafting the quote, escalating the parts a person should see.
Read more BKGBooking and reservation platforms
The system your revenue actually passes through — search, availability, quoting, payment, confirmation, amendment, cancellation. Built to survive the edge cases.
Read more RAGPrivate AI over your own data
Search and answering across your internal documents, contracts, records and history — running where your data is allowed to be.
Read moreStart a conversation
Have a project like this?
Send us a paragraph describing what the system needs to do and what you are using now. We will come back with an honest view of whether it is a fit and roughly what it costs.