Custom CRM and business software
Where your clients are, where each one stands, what needs doing now. When those three answers live in one place, the business stops depending on people’s memory.
What it looks like
It usually starts like this
- Clients are scattered across WhatsApp, email and a spreadsheet
- “Where are we with that client?” depends on who’s in the office
- Only one person remembers the deadlines
- A deal’s history is a chat you have to scroll through
A generic CRM imposes its own vocabulary: its stages, its required fields, its way of naming things. If your work doesn’t look like that, you end up with a half-filled database, and nobody looks at a half-filled database anymore.
What I build
Records and pipeline
Contacts, companies and deals with the statuses you actually use, not the ones decided by an American product. A deal can only move through the transitions that make sense: anything else isn’t a warning, it’s impossible.
Tasks, deadlines and history
What was said, what was promised, what needs to be done and by when. The history isn’t a chat to scroll through: it’s the list of what happened, readable even by someone who wasn’t there.
Permissions and roles
Who sees what, who can change what. An external collaborator, a department, an owner: three different views of the same data, decided once and valid everywhere.
Quotes and documents
From the data already in the system to a finished document, with the same numbers and the same format every time. This is where business software stops being an archive and starts saving hours.
Reports and operational views
What’s late, what’s stuck, what closes this month. The same questions people ask out loud today, with an answer you look at instead of piecing together.
How it works
The system, not just the screen
How a custom CRM works
- Client
- CRM
- Data
- Automations
- Control
Real example:Valsusa BIOS
From client to inspection, in a single system.
ClientCalendarSurveyQuotePDFSupplierInspection
It starts from the vocabulary of the people doing the work
Before designing screens, I write down what a client is, what a deal is, what “closed” means in that business. The wrong words in the model turn into fields nobody fills in.
Data is recorded as the work happens
If updating the CRM is a second job, the CRM gets abandoned within three weeks. Data entry sits inside the actions people would take anyway.
Automation removes work, it doesn’t move it
Reminders, emails, status changes, generated documents: whatever repeats identically runs on its own and leaves a record of what happened.
It connects to what already exists
The website that collects inquiries, the inbox, the tools you already use, the accounting software: data enters where it’s created instead of being retyped.
Use cases
- Bringing together the contacts that now live across phones, email and shared spreadsheets
- Giving a team a pipeline whose statuses describe the real work, not the software’s idea of it
- Generating quotes from data already in the system, always in the same format
- Separating what an external collaborator sees from what the person running the business sees
- Connecting the website to the CRM, so an inquiry arrives already as a contact, with its source
Technologies
Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Supabase, Node.js, Vercel
The tools I use most often on this kind of project. They aren’t affiliations: they’re choices I revisit when a project calls for something else.
Questions
- Can I connect the CRM to the tools I already use?
- Yes, when the tool offers a way to do it: APIs, webhooks, scheduled exports. It’s the first thing I check, because it determines how much work stays manual: if a system can’t be connected, it’s better to know before designing around that assumption.
- Can I import the data I have now?
- Usually, yes: spreadsheets, exports from your current software, address books. Importing is a job in itself (the data has to be read, cleaned up and mapped to the new model) and needs to be planned along with everything else, not taken for granted.
- Do I need business software, or is a CRM enough?
- It depends on where the problem is. If it’s about clients and deals, it’s a CRM; if it’s about orders, production, inventory or documents, it’s business software; often it’s a single system with two different areas. You figure it out by looking at the process, not by picking the word first.
If yours isn’t here, see all the others.
