Customer portals, delivery dashboards, hour tracking, and reporting tools for 10 to 50-person consulting, legal, accounting, and recruiting firms. Senior engineer on subscription at $4,999/mo.
- Scope
- Ship
- Iterate
monthly subscription
Who this is for
Managing partner or operations lead at a 10 to 50-person professional services firm where customer onboarding, engagement tracking, and billing all live across a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and Notion pages with no single source of truth.
The pain today
- Engagement status lives in a partner's head or a Slack thread
- Hour logging is done in weekly batches — real work goes uncaptured
- Customer reporting means pulling manually from three different tools
- Onboarding the same customer information repeatedly across different documents
- Handoffs between senior and junior staff regularly lose context
The outcome you get
- Custom B2B services app on subscription at $4,999/mo
- Customer portal, delivery dashboard, or hour tracker in 8 to 12 weeks
- Clean multi-customer architecture with role-based access controls
- Integrations with CRM, accounting, and communication tools you already use
- Internal dashboards partners and ops leads actually open every morning
Where professional services firms leak time and revenue
Four patterns show up across every professional services engagement I work on. Customer onboarding collects the same information twice — once on a call, once across a document chain. Engagement tracking lives in a partner's memory or a fragmented Slack thread, so status checks become interruptions. Hour logging happens weekly in batches, which means 10 to 20 percent of actual work never makes it onto an invoice. And customer reporting pulls manually from three or four sources every time a QBR comes around.
Each of these is a candidate for a focused internal or customer-facing app. The decision isn't always to build — but for firms between 10 and 50 people where the tool patchwork is already costing billable hours, a well-scoped custom app pays back within a quarter.
Custom B2B services app on subscription at $4,999/mo
Build vs buy: when custom makes sense for services firms
Off-the-shelf tools handle the simple cases well. Harvest or Toggl for time tracking under 10 people. Notion plus HubSpot for onboarding up to a point. SuiteDash for lightweight customer collaboration. These cost $100 to $500 a month total and are the right answer at early scale.
Custom development makes sense when the patchwork itself becomes the bottleneck. Specifically: when you need your CRM, PM tool, and billing system talking to each other in a way no connector product handles cleanly; when access control needs to be multi-layered (partners see all customers, associates see assigned customers, customers see only their own data); or when you are starting to lose billable hours to tool-switching and manual reporting. Per-seat pricing on off-the-shelf platforms compounds fast. A portal serving 40 active users on a $500/month platform runs $18,000 over three years before any customization — and you still don't own the data or the logic.
My target is firms where a custom app materially affects utilisation rate and partner time. If you're under 10 people, I'll tell you that better Notion hygiene will fix your pain before custom software will.
+500%: Lead base growth.
Apps I build for services firms
Customer portals: engagement status, deliverables, invoices, documents — all visible to the right people without an email chain. Delivery dashboards: project status across customers, capacity visibility, deadline tracking for ops and partners. Hour tracking and billing: time capture with rate logic per customer, invoice generation from logged data. Customer reporting tools: branded QBR reports and web dashboards pulled from live engagement data. Internal ops dashboards: utilisation by team member, profitability per customer, pipeline health. Customer onboarding: structured intake, document collection, kickoff scheduling in one flow.
Each maps to a specific firm pain. I scope the first one based on where your partners are spending the most untracked time.
Integrations that matter in professional services
CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive. Accounting: QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks. Project management: Notion, Asana, Monday, Basecamp. Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams. Document storage: Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive. Email: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
The custom app rarely replaces these tools — it creates a unified layer on top of them. The value is the automation and the single view, not the replacement. I build integrations using the official APIs for each platform. Most CRM integrations take 1 to 2 weeks during the engagement; accounting integrations run similar. For firms with a complex Salesforce implementation, I scope that separately at engagement start.
Security, access control, and data isolation
Every customer's data stays separate with tenant-aware queries at every layer — there is no situation where one customer's records bleed into another's view. Internal staff get role-based access: a partner sees all customers, an associate sees assigned engagements, a junior sees specific work items. For firms in regulated sectors — legal, healthcare consulting, financial advisory — I add stricter access controls and audit logging as standard, not as an add-on.
All apps ship with HTTPS-only access, secure session handling, and environment-separated secrets. For firms with compliance requirements like SOC 2 or ISO 27001, the architecture I use maps cleanly to those control frameworks. I've built payment infrastructure for a $1B+ unicorn, bolttech, across 40+ integrations — data integrity and access control are not afterthoughts in how I build.
Subscription model: what you get and when
Standard plan is $4,999/mo. Pro is $5,499/mo. Both include 2 to 4-day delivery cycles, direct communication with me, and senior engineering on every line of code. There are no account managers between you and the work.
First deliverable in 8 to 12 weeks depending on scope. For a single-module app (one of: customer portal, delivery dashboard, hour tracker), 8 weeks is typical. Multi-module builds with integrations land around 12 weeks. 14-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime. All code is yours under Work Made for Hire — you walk away owning the full codebase, not a license.
For firms considering turning the internal app into a product they offer customers down the road, multi-tenant architecture and payment infrastructure differ from a pure internal build. I factor that in from the start if productisation is a goal.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
A custom CRM that turned Google Maps into a lead machine
Built a purpose-built CRM for a digital agency that captures leads from Google Maps, reaches them via official WhatsApp (Twilio + Meta API), and uses AI to suggest replies and standardize templates. The system scaled the lead base by over 500%, with 250 new leads entering the pipeline every day.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
When the off-the-shelf tool gap is costing you billable hours. Platforms like Harvest and SuiteDash cover simple time tracking and light customer collaboration well. Custom makes sense when you need your CRM, billing system, and PM tool talking to each other in a way no connector handles cleanly — or when per-seat pricing is compounding past the cost of building. For firms under 10 people, I usually suggest fixing tool configuration before committing to custom development.
A focused single-module app — customer portal or delivery dashboard — takes around 8 weeks from kickoff to first production deploy. Multi-module builds with two or three integrations run 10 to 12 weeks. Each additional integration (CRM, accounting, document storage) adds 1 to 2 weeks. I work in 2 to 4-day delivery cycles, so there are working builds to review throughout, not one final handoff at the end.
Yes. HubSpot integration is straightforward — customers from HubSpot sync to the app, engagement status updates back to HubSpot, deal stages track across both. Salesforce works through the REST API and takes a similar amount of time. For firms with a heavily customised Salesforce instance, I scope that integration separately at the start of the engagement. The custom app typically becomes a specialised workflow layer on top of CRM data rather than a replacement for it.
Tenant-aware queries at every layer of the stack — there is no situation where one customer's data surfaces in another customer's view. Internal staff get role-based access scoped to what they actually need: partners see across all customers, associates see their assigned engagements, junior staff see specific work items. For firms in regulated sectors — legal, healthcare consulting, financial advisory — I add audit logging and stricter access controls as a standard part of the build.
Yes. Customers get their own login with a branded portal showing their engagement status, deliverables, invoices, and documents. You control what each customer can and cannot see. Some firms prefer to start with an internal-only app and add the customer-facing surface later — that's a normal sequence. Adding a customer-facing layer to an existing internal app typically takes 2 to 4 additional weeks, depending on how much of the data model was already designed with external access in mind.
Productisation is possible and worth planning for from the start, because the architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS product differs from a pure internal tool. If that's a goal, I factor in the multi-tenant data model and payment infrastructure from day one rather than retrofitting later. The Norte Web Digital CRM I built went from internal lead tool to production system serving 9,000+ companies — the difference between a tool built for one firm and one that scales is in the data model decisions made early.
Standard at $4,999/mo and Pro at $5,499/mo both include active feature development, 2 to 4-day delivery cycles, direct access to me (not an account manager), and senior engineering on every task. The 14-day money-back guarantee applies. Code ownership transfers fully under Work Made for Hire. Third-party API costs — Twilio, Stripe, AWS, etc. — are billed to your accounts directly. I don't mark up infrastructure.