From spreadsheet to inspection platform in twelve weeks
A field-inspection MVP that replaced a sprawl of spreadsheets, with audit trails designed in from week one — shipped in twelve weeks.
The situation
What was happening before we got involved.
A small compliance firm had been managing inspection workflows in a tangle of spreadsheets and email threads. Every audit took longer than the last. The risk wasn't theoretical — they'd been close to losing a contract over a missing record. They'd seen agency proposals for "a six-month discovery phase". They wanted a working product, not a slide deck.
What we did
The decisions we made, and why.
- 01
Audit trails as a feature, not a finish
Designed the data model to record every state change with a timestamp and an actor before any UI got built. Not retrofitted in week ten — designed in week one, because compliance software lives or dies on this.
- 02
Mobile-first for inspectors, desktop for back-office
Inspectors spend their day in vans, in basements, in places without signal. We built offline-first for them. The back-office team got a desktop-first surface against the same data.
- 03
One model, two surfaces
Resisted the temptation to build a separate mobile and web product. Single backend, single data model, two front-ends sharing components. Cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, harder to drift.
The outcome
What changed, in production.
An inspection platform in production at the end of week twelve, with twenty-three inspectors using it daily within two months of launch. The audit trail design has held up through a real regulatory review since — without changes.
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8 weeks
Time to first user
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12 weeks
Time to launch
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23
Active inspectors at month three
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Liverpool, UK. Available across the UK and remote.