how we got here
It began as a timesheet
Nobody sets out to write accounting software. This started in 2011 as a timesheet for one practice, became four or five spreadsheets that all knew a bit about each other, and only turned into this once the copying got out of hand.
It was written inside an architecture and building-physics practice, so that is the shape it fits best: jobs with stages, hours logged against a stage, drawings issued to people who later need proof they received them, and a fee that comes out of all of it. Engineers, surveyors, planners and most other consultants run the same week — only the drawings change.
scroll on — the road goes sideways
2011
It started as a timesheet
One file, on one computer, in a practice with just enough jobs to need one. Hours down the side, jobs across the top, and a total at the bottom that was usually right. Everything here still hangs off that screen.
then
Then it was four or five
Fees in the second one. Then an invoice register, a list of who owed what, and a workbook for the BAS with a tab nobody could safely open. Every new question got a new sheet, because a new sheet is always the quickest thing to do on a Tuesday.
all along
We did go looking
We have never paid for office-management software, and not for want of trying. Everything on offer was built for a practice that wasn’t ours, and the test we set was a low bar, and not the one people assume: not whether it was BETTER software than a spreadsheet, but whether it was EASIER than one. Nothing cleared it. So the spreadsheets stayed, and — this is the awkward part — they worked. For years.
then the work came
Then the jobs picked up
Which is the good problem to have, right up until it is simply the problem you have. More jobs, more tabs, more rows — and more of the one thing a spreadsheet quietly makes you do.
the gap
The same hours, typed three times
To work out what to invoice, the week was copied into the fee sheet, the fee sheet into the invoice, and the invoice into the register. Three copies of one fact, each free to drift — and in a busy month they did. That gap is the whole reason any of this exists.
so
So we built our own
Not a replacement for the spreadsheets. A way of only ever typing the hour once: on the day it happened, in the place it happened, and then letting it turn up by itself everywhere it was needed. Communications and invoicing first, because that is where the copying was worst.
the point
Starting with the invoice
Most invoices read like a printer apologising. Ours is the last thing a client sees before deciding how they feel about paying us, so it carries our letterhead, our ABN, our bank details, and a statement of hours that explains itself. (It is still an invoice. It is just no longer embarrassed about it.)
and then
Built for a head that jumps about
A lot of people running small practices are hyperactive. The one who built this certainly is. So there is more than one way into the same job — say it into your phone and it files itself, start a timer, or click on the hour you have just lost — and nothing a mail sweep digs up lands on your list without you agreeing to it first. There is also a mode with handwriting and confetti, because ticking something off ought to feel like ticking something off.
now
It worked here first
A decade and a half of spreadsheets went in; one portal came out. The practice runs on it — the jobs, the hours, the drawings that went out, the BAS, the lot. It was only ever meant to service this company. Then people started looking at it, and recognised their own four or five spreadsheets.
and that, more or less, is the record.
It is called Working Record because a record is both the thing you keep and the thing that plays the same tune every time you drop the needle. Years of copying taught us which one matters.
What came out of it
One portal, running one architecture and building-physics practice: the jobs, the hours against them, the drawings issued, the invoices raised, the money received and the BAS at the end of it. No sync, no second system, no evening spent reconciling two versions of the same month.
It was never meant to be a product. It was built to service our own company, and it stayed that way for a long time — then people started looking over our shoulder at it, recognised their own four or five spreadsheets, and asked.