The client came looking for accounting software. The market is full of it, and that was the problem: every tool solved one slice well and left the seams to the customer. Quoting lived in one place, invoicing in another, stock in a spreadsheet, and the accounts were assembled afterwards from all three. What they actually wanted was one ecosystem for running the business, where a document raised at the front of the process moved the stock and landed in the accounts without anyone retyping it.
Quotations, invoices, purchase orders and the rest of the paper trail generated from one shared record, with a flow designed to handle how these documents actually follow one another rather than treating each as a fresh form.
Purchase reports, sales reports and balance-sheet reconciliation built from income and expense as the documents record them. The ledger is a view of the same data, so there is no second system to keep in step.
Stock was the hardest part, because goods move constantly and every movement has a document behind it. Selling an item raises the invoice or receipt, and the count moves with it, in one system rather than reconciled across two.
An assistant that reads the live business data, so an owner can ask something like “how much in invoices is unpaid over the last 15 days, and which clients” and get the report back instead of building it.
Most of the time lost in a system like this goes on re-entering things it already knows. These are the places where it stopped asking.
One team across the whole engagement, from working out what the product needed to be through to taking it to market.