TradeyHub: five spreadsheets, one system

The situation

TradeyHub came to us with the problem almost every growing trades operation reaches. The business ran, and ran well, on a set of spreadsheets that had each been created to solve a specific problem at a specific moment. Customers in one. Jobs in another. Quotes in a third. Scheduling in a fourth. Something approximating a set of accounts in a fifth.

None of them was badly built. The problem was that the same customer existed in all five, in five slightly different forms, and every change had to be made in each one — or, more realistically, in the two or three somebody remembered.

What we did first

We mapped the work before writing anything, which is how every build starts here. Following one job from enquiry to payment showed where the duplication actually was, and it was not where anyone expected: the expensive re-entry was not the customer record, it was the job detail being retyped into a quote and then again into an invoice.

That produced a written plan ranking each piece of duplication by what it was costing per year, and a fixed quote. Two items on that list came back marked as not worth building, which is normal, and is the part that makes the rest of the document trustworthy.

What we built

A single platform holding customers, jobs, quotes and scheduling, with one record per customer and one record per job. A quote becomes an invoice without anything being retyped. Job history attaches to the customer rather than living in a separate sheet.

It was delivered in stages, with the quote-to-invoice link first because it carried the largest measurable saving and the lowest risk. That meant part of the system was in daily use while the rest was still being built, rather than everything arriving at once at the end.

Where it is now

The platform is live, and we continue to host, support and extend it. That continuity is the point: the people who built it are the people who run it, so a change request goes to somebody who already understands why a decision was made in the first place.