One core, many back offices

Context

A digital agency on the Lower Rhine builds web presences and tools for established Mittelstand companies. Behind many of those businesses sat the same unsolved problem: orders, customers and internal workflows managed in spreadsheets and ageing desktop software.

The agency watched the pattern repeat with every new client — and decided to make custom back-office software part of its own offer, with us leading the technical execution.

Challenge

Every client needed a back office shaped around their own processes — but building each one from scratch would never be economical for an agency, and off-the-shelf ERP was too heavy and too rigid for the businesses involved.

What we built

We designed a reusable back-office core in Laravel and Vue.js — authentication, fine-grained roles and permissions, master data, workflows and reporting as a common foundation.

The core covers what every business needs: projects and tasks with deadlines, estimates and automatic progress tracking; clients and contacts with full commercial data; time tracking with an approval workflow; a lightweight sales pipeline; and a billing trail from "work done" to "invoice paid".

On top of it we delivered tailored systems for the agency itself and several of its clients, each one following the customer's real processes from order intake through production to invoicing. Clean architecture, code review and disciplined source-control workflows kept the whole family of systems maintainable by a small team.

• Laravel
• Vue.js
• MySQL
• REST APIs

Outcome

Four production back-office systems on one maintained core — each client got custom software at a fraction of from-scratch cost, and the agency got a product platform instead of a pile of one-offs.

Spreadsheets and ageing desktop tools gave way to one system per business — and the agency could onboard the next client onto the same core instead of starting over.