Custom software

The internal tool that no product quite fits

Most businesses have one process that every tool gets almost right. So it stays in a spreadsheet, and one person becomes the only one who understands it. That is the work this is for: not a product, not a platform, just the specific thing your business does, built properly and owned by you.

What this usually looks like

No.ShapeWhat it means in practice

01Internal portalsA place for one group of people to do one job, with the fields they actually use and none of the ones they do not. Usually replacing a shared spreadsheet that three people are afraid to touch.

02Permissions and audit trailWho may see what, who may change it, and a record of who changed it and when. This is the part off-the-shelf tools get wrong and the part auditors ask about.

03Document systemsUpload, version, approve, retrieve. Connected to the storage you already pay for rather than another subscription with your files in it.

04Dashboards and reportingThe report somebody rebuilds by hand every Monday, built once and left to run. Reading from the live database, not a copied extract.

05Integrations between things that do not integrateTwo systems that will never have an official integration, made to agree. Usually the accounting system and whatever the business actually runs on.

What we have built

No.SystemWhat it does

01A document management systemNext.js and PostgreSQL, wired to OneDrive, with per-role permissions and a full audit log of every change.

02A teacher’s test builderTeachers assemble papers from a question bank of tens of thousands of real exam questions and print them. In daily use by schools.

03A student practice portalStudents answer past-paper questions and are marked as they go, with the reasoning shown. Accounts, progress, payments.

04A book production pipelineThousands of exam questions turned into print-ready books automatically — the kind of document engineering nobody sells as a product because every case is different.

How we build it

On a database you own, on a server you control, in boring technology that somebody else can pick up: PostgreSQL or MySQL, a conventional web stack, and no framework chosen because it was interesting. You get the repository. If we disappeared tomorrow, another developer could read it.

We also say no. If an existing product fits — and for CRM, accounting and helpdesk it usually does — we will tell you to buy it and we will help you configure it instead. Custom software is the most expensive way to solve a problem and should be the last one considered.

Book a friction audit

hello@inertiaautomate.com