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Jobs and Quotes Tracker for an Essex Installer

Client

Hainault Home Improvements

Industry

Doors, Windows and Fire Doors / Essex

Tech Stack

Next.jsTypeScriptDrizzle ORMPostgreSQLRailway (EU)Tailwind CSSVercel

Timeline

Built and launched 2026

The Challenge

Hainault Home Improvements install doors, windows and fire doors across Essex. The entire operation ran on a spreadsheet: 1,499 jobs, one file, no reliable way to see what was quoted, what was booked, what was fitted, and what was still owed.

Spreadsheets fail quietly at that size. Two people open the same file and one set of edits wins. A job moves stage and nobody downstream finds out. Chasing became memory work rather than process, and the questions that matter most, which jobs are stuck and which quotes never got followed up, took an afternoon to answer instead of a glance.

The team also needed it to be genuinely usable on site. Anything requiring individual accounts, password resets and IT support was going to be abandoned within a fortnight.

What We Built

We built a live jobs and quotes tracker around how the business already works, then imported the full 1,499-job history so it launched with real data rather than an empty system.

Access is deliberately low-friction: a single shared passcode, then pick your name from a list. No per-user passwords, no reset emails, no IT overhead, while still attributing every action to a person. It is the difference between a tool the team uses and one they work around.

The board tracks each job through its real stages, so status is a shared fact rather than something reconstructed from memory. It is themed to the company's own light brand rather than a generic dashboard look.

A second stream handles their contract work, which has different reporting needs from domestic jobs. That comes with a read-only client portal, so the contract client sees progress directly without anyone assembling a status report by hand, and without exposing anything they should not see.

Results

  • 1,499 historic jobs migrated from spreadsheet to database at launch
  • Live in production and in daily use by the team
  • Shared-passcode access with per-person attribution: no accounts to administer
  • Separate contract stream with a read-only portal for the contract client
  • Job status visible to everyone at once, instead of living in one editable file
  • EU-hosted Postgres, with nightly encrypted off-site backups

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