4 signs your organisation needs a customised low code web app, not an off-the-shelf one
Digital tools are everywhere and there’s an amazing range. You may have 15 to 20 in your organisation and not be aware of half of them!
At some stage, your organisation will get to the point where you’ve added too many off the shelf web apps and they’re still not doing everything you need them to. For instance, you can’t see all the crucial data in one report, as its spread across so many tools and requires so much manual admin to build each time.
We’ve written this piece to help you figure out whether you’ve come to the point of needing to investigate building a custom web app (it isn’t always, see our previous post about why off the shelf web apps are often the best bet). We’ve been figuring these problems out since 2014, so we’ll share some of the common signs we’ve seen that indicate you need to explore this path.
Sign #1 - You’ve got multiple types of data, and you need them in one place
Asana or Trello are great for managing tasks but what if those tasks have financial elements? Those tools aren’t good at storing financial data. Or, what if you’ve got financial info in your financial tool and you want to see the relevant project data? Your financial tool isn’t designed to manage projects (technically Xero has a few project management options but they don’t stack up against Asana).
Sign #2 - Your tool can see the past but not the future
Take financial software, they’re great at telling you what you already know, how much money you invoiced last month. But what if you want to know how much money you’re going to invoice in 3 months time?
Sure there might be a basic budget manager which you can update manually or with a file upload, but what if you want to see real time forecasts based on milestones your team are updating in real time? No can do.
Sign #3 - Your data has complex relationships
For instance, a client has many projects, a project has many team members and milestones, milestones have invoices, invoices have line items. Try modelling that in a spreadsheet! No fun. And sure you can do it in Airtable but you’ll have to give newbies a good induction on how to use it and how not to break it (one day Airtable interfaces might be more useful there).
Sign #4 - Your culture
When you’re dealing with important organisational language at the intersection of lot’s of important information, it’s not always a good idea to defer to the language a VC funded startup chooses.
If your organisation is trying to put humans at it’s centre then language is crucial as it’s the very basis of culture, and culture IS your organisation, so it’s important that these tools replicate how your human’s work, and talk, and think.
Conclusion
Off the shelf web apps are great for quickly solving a common problem
No amount of these web apps will solve every problem
If you’re struggling with the lack of a single source of truth or complex data you might need a custom web app
Custom web apps are great for dealing with embedding crucial organisation language in your systems
Appendix
If you’ve got this far, you may want a concrete example to help you get your head around these problems.
One of our clients has a decentralised approach to their business development. ie. There isn’t one person maintaining or managing all of the data (and who would want that job anyway!). Once their deals are converted to a “won” project, there’s a bunch of data that needs to be tracked on each project.
Xero tracks historical finances and provides an invoicing workflow.
Asana tracks project tasks
Harvest provides time tracking
Google Drive stores the contract
A Google Sheet tracks staff capacity
But which system is bringing all of that info together? How do we know how much revenue will be arriving in 6 months time based on current projections? How can finance assemble each invoice without sending lots of Slack messages to find out the progress of each project? None of those tools know.
The best you can do on Xero is to constantly update the budget which can’t easily be automated.
On Asana, you could add some custom fields but it’s not designed for summing up financial data.
In Google Drive you could create more spreadsheets but this data has lot’s of relationships which spreadsheets can only model in a very fragile way (eg. Vlookups and nested Index(match) formula’s). Once you plug in an automation tool, you’re going to be be constantly settling this very moody baby! And… without a custom web app as a solid central place to start, that automation software is going to be quite hard to maintain.