Why we built our own information system

An expert would say that building your own information system is reinventing the wheel – after all, you can rent one. So we built our own.

The reasons were simple. We added up the cost of every service the company needs to run and factored in growth: there are gradually more of us, and the more of us there are, the more the licences cost.

Licences grow with the team

The more of us there are, the more we pay to rent software we will never own.

Savings like these appear even at the scale of a micro-business. Imagine the impact on any larger organisation.

Records buried in folders

In practice, it also did not pay to subscribe to a service for every little thing. A lot of our records therefore ended up buried in cloud storage folders, spreadsheets and documents.

At first we did not see a problem. But as we kept growing, finding and recording anything took more and more time. More importantly, connecting the records across services was something of a challenge.

What the system does

Our information system includes modules for:

• timesheets,

• projects,

• clients,

• finance.

On top of all that, we can generate exactly the reports we need. That is not the full list of features, but these modules matter most to the business.

Admin that (almost) does not hurt

We are not only pleased to have saved money and brought all our services into one place. The system has had genuinely enthusiastic feedback from the team: it is pleasantly motivating and takes (almost) all the reluctance out of admin. It is our labour of love, crafted by ourselves.

Above all, thanks to complete and well-organised data, it helps us predict whether a project makes sense and whether it will pay off.

A step forward during COVID-19

Despite the difficult situation around COVID-19, this step improves how we work as a team – even though we are working from home and trying not to add to the worsening infection figures.

Yes, we work in IT, so remote work is easier for us than in many other fields. We are a young team that has been used to working from home most of the time. As we grew, though, our offices became a blessing. All the more reason we are glad to have reached this point during intensive development. It will help us keep meeting our clients’ expectations to the full – thanks to all the tools around us, not just our own information system. You can read more about it in the TwoDo IS case study.