Bespoke Development

You've selected one of the available tools to run an aspect of your business, and it does a pretty good job on the whole.

But there are workaround and compromises, and places where it can't quite work the way you want it to.

It's not that it's a bad tool; it's just that it's made to fit the average business, rather than being made to fit yours.

It's like buying your clothes at a popular chain store versus wearing one of a kind outfits tailored especially for you. The tailor-made will always fit you like a glove, and the off-the-shelf outfit may never be quite as perfect.

What kind of things do people hire me to do?

Here's a selection of my recent projects to show you the kind of things that are possible with custom code.

• Pulling upcoming class details from a training school's private booking system and formatting for display on their pre-sales website.
• Bulk processing images and resizing them ready for upload to the client's online store. It only takes 30 seconds to process 100 photos with the resulting code, saving an hour or more each time the task is repeated.

• Amalgamating data from Square and Acuity Scheduling to produce a single sales report with all the information needed to make business decisions. This critical information was not readily available within either tool.
• Creating a new lead in a CRM when a new customer books an appointment. Although both tools have open APIs, Zapier only supported one of them so we had to write custom code.
• Pulling information on class bookings from Scheduling to create a booking sheet for each class that can be shared with the trainer. This process had previously taken hours to accomplish manually for this busy business that sees more than 200 bookings a week.

• Mapping a package booking on one calendar to a series of corresponding modules on another calendar so that volunteer coaches can claim specific sessions rather than the whole package. We needed the custom code because the functionality required was not available in the chosen tool.

As you can see, custom code is flexible and as varied as the people using it. The first step is always a conversaton to talk about your goals and advise you on what's possible.