What’s in the pipeline

being built now

In hand

• Bookings, centralised properly

  The portal already works out free times, holds each brand’s consultation types and takes payment. What is still true is that a booking made on one of the brand sites is written by that site and imported here by hand. Finishing the cutover means one diary that cannot disagree with itself.

on the board

Next, and after that

• More kinds of export out of a pay run

  A pay run already leaves as a Single Touch Export. Next is the payment side of the same press: a transfer file your bank will take, so paying six people is an upload rather than six lots of typing — and exports shaped for the payroll services practices already use, so the figures only get keyed once.

• Messaging, inside the job

  A team channel for the office and a channel per project for talking to the client about that job — so the conversation sits with the work rather than in somebody’s phone, and the next person on the job can read it.

• Email that behaves like a real mail client

  Switch between accounts or read them as one, properly formatted, with HTML replies and a pop-out compose window. Plus triage that comes back with a draft reply to approve rather than a list of things to deal with.

• A calendar that holds several calendars

  Seeing more than one at once, adding and accepting events, and importing them the way you would anywhere else. Email and the calendar are the two screens a practice lives in, and the calendar is the one still catching up.

• A hyperactive mode, past fun mode

  Three levels rather than a switch: plain, fun, and one that leans on colour and movement — project tags, task deadlines and people colour-coded so a screen can be scanned rather than read. Built because the person who writes this software has that brain, and the current fun mode only goes half way.

• Mark up a drawing on the board

  Drag a note off another note and keep them connected, and the markup tools a set of drawings actually needs — lines, clouds, revision clouds, annotations, and measuring an area straight off an imported PDF.

• Fee projection and who is free to do it

  The pipeline already carries what each enquiry is worth and when it is expected. The next piece is projecting those fees across the months ahead against the hours the practice actually has — so the answer to “can we take this on” comes from the diary rather than from optimism.

• Practices with more than one address

  Several locations under one trading name, with income recorded and read per location, the right address on the invoice, and staff attached to a location rather than to the whole company.

• ABIC contract administration

  The architect’s fee arrangement set up at the start of a job and carried through to the contract administration on it, with variation records and progress claims against the standard form rather than in a separate spreadsheet.

• Undo

  A log of what you did this session, and a way back from the last one. Currently the portal protects you by refusing things it cannot safely reverse; this is the other half of that promise.

• Letting a trial tester change absolutely anything

  Including the project numbers, which the portal assigns itself so that two people creating jobs at once cannot collide. On a trial that caution is the wrong trade — you should be able to make it look like your practice, not ours.

and if you want a go

The call, and the trial that follows it

There is no self-serve button, and that is a decision rather than a limitation: an empty portal is the best way ever invented to make good software look like nothing. Here is exactly what happens instead.

1. 1

   Book the call

   Thirty minutes, free, from a diary that is genuinely his — the times offered are his working hours minus his actual calendar minus anything already booked, worked out on the server rather than guessed by the page. Pick one, give a name and an address, and you get a calendar invitation with a meeting link in it.

   you · about a minute

2. 2

   The call itself

   A video call in the portal’s own meeting room — no account, no download, the link in your invitation opens it. We share a screen and open a working portal, and you say what you want to see. Bring the part of your current setup that annoys you most; that is the half hour worth having. If it is plainly not a fit, we will say so on the call.

   both of us · half an hour

3. 3

   We stand your trial up

   Your own subdomain, your own database, your own file storage. We put your numbering pattern in, your stages, your trading name and its colours, and — if you send them — a few of your real jobs. It arrives filled with a sample practice as well, so every screen has something behind it from the first minute.

   us · usually the same day

4. 4

   You get the keys

   An email with the address, what to sign in with, when the trial runs to, and a link to set your own password. From there it is a real portal: send a real invoice, take a real payment, issue a real transmittal. Nothing is a demo mode.

   you · as long as it takes

5. 5

   Press everything, break nothing

   There is a Reset the sample data button on the Start here panel that puts the sample practice back exactly as it arrived — projects, hours, invoices and expenses replaced with a fresh set. Your own login survives it. Nobody has to be careful.

   you · whenever

6. 6

   Then you decide

   Run a month of real work through it if you can; that teaches you more than a fortnight of poking. If you want longer, say so — the end date is a date on a record, not a wall. If you walk away, every job archives to a bundle you could rebuild from, and the year leaves as a pack your accountant can read.

   both of us

Prefer to write first? There is a form, and it comes back to a person.

The list above moves because somebody asks. A practice running two offices is why multi-location is on it; a fortnight of typing bank transfers by hand is why the payment file is on it.