Service — Systems
The software behind the website.
Payments, bookings, customer records, and the integrations that join them to the tools you already run. This is the line where the complicated cases live — and complicated is the part I am interested in.
Who this is for
- Bookings arrive by phone, get written in a paper diary, and get double-booked about once a month.
- You take payment by e-transfer and reconcile it by hand, because the alternative looked like a project.
- Your team already works in Microsoft 365, and the numbers you need are scattered across SharePoint, spreadsheets and inboxes that nothing joins up.
- Your business runs on rules a customer finds baffling — eligibility criteria, rebate programmes, tax rules, licensing — and explaining them one at a time is eating your week.
What you get
- Stripe payments, end to end
- Booking and scheduling that fits how you actually work
- Customer databases and client portals
- Microsoft 365 integration — Power Apps, Power BI, SharePoint, Power Automate
- Automation and AI, applied where they remove real manual work
- Rules-heavy work welcome — tax, grants, licensing, compliance
How it works
Stripe handles the money, integrated end to end: checkout, receipts, refunds, failed payments, and the webhooks that keep your own records in step with theirs. Card details never touch your systems, which keeps the compliance question small.
Bookings get built around how the business actually works rather than how a generic scheduling app assumes it does — real availability, real lead times, the buffer you need between jobs, the deposit if you take one.
Most businesses already run software worth keeping, so a good share of this work is integration rather than replacement. Microsoft 365 is the common case: Power Apps and Power Automate for internal tools and approvals, SharePoint for the documents and lists behind them, Power BI for the reporting on top. The same goes for whatever else is already in the stack — accounting, CRM, email, calendars, inventory, or a supplier’s API. The goal is one set of numbers instead of four.
Automation is usually where the money is. Anything done the same way every week — rekeying an order into a second system, chasing an approval, rebuilding the same report on the first of the month — can generally be made to happen on its own. AI goes in where it earns its place: reading unstructured documents, classifying what arrives, drafting a first version someone then approves. It goes in as a step inside a process with a human check at the end, not as a chatbot bolted to the corner of a page.
The rules-heavy work is the interesting part. RailTax Canada exists because Canadian railway employees can deduct meals and lodging under the CRA’s TL2 rules, but only if every trip across the year is reconstructed — so it has a parser that reads a member’s trip file, works out which trips qualify, and exports the report. Scheelar Energy needed three separate rebate programmes, each with its own criteria, explained to homeowners in language they could act on.
That is the pattern worth naming: when the value of a business sits inside regulations, the software has to be right, and it has to make sense to someone who finds the subject confusing. Most web shops will not take that work. It is the work I would rather be doing.
What it costs
- Systems work
- from $4,500
- Stripe, bookings, customer database, portal, Microsoft 365 and third-party integrations, automation
- Added to a website build
- quoted together
- Usually cheaper than the two separately — the groundwork is shared
Canadian dollars, excluding HST. Every figure is a starting point, not a quote.
The other three
Websites
New builds and rebuilds. Fast, accessible, and yours outright — no page builder, no monthly licence.
from $3,500Search visibility
Being found by the people already looking for what you do.
from $1,200Care
Hosting, monitoring, backups and changes. Launch is the start, not the finish.
from $75/monthTell me what you are working with
A short email is enough to start — what the business does, and what is not working. I reply to every enquiry within one business day.