People, contracts and payroll
Employee records with bank details, documents, education history and employment contracts. Payroll runs generate payslips line by line, so an adjustment is a visible line rather than an edited total.
All projects The spreadsheets
Proactive ERP
Business management platform In production
The spreadsheets
that ran the company.
The system the business runs itself on. People, contracts and payroll; clients, projects and the engineers assigned to them; invoices, payments, expenses and company assets - one connected record rather than eight spreadsheets that disagree with each other by the end of every month.
Built for Proactive IT - built in-house and used every day
This one runs on live business data, so there is no public demo. A walkthrough on a call is the next best thing, and we are happy to do it.
8
Linked modules
3
Currencies, rate-stamped
Counted from the application: the modules that share one database, and the currencies every monetary figure can be held and converted in.
What it was like before
Payroll lived in one spreadsheet, invoicing in another, engineer assignments in a third, and the asset register in somebody’s memory. Every month closed with a reconciliation nobody enjoyed, in three currencies, and answering "what did that client actually cost us" meant opening four files and hoping they agreed.
What we built
One platform where an hour logged against a project flows through to the invoice, an engineer assigned to a client shows up in payroll, and every asset has a person attached to it. Multi-currency throughout, with stored exchange rates so a historic figure stays what it was. Every write is audited, so a number can always be traced back to who changed it.
What it
actually does.
Clients, projects and assignments
Engineers are assigned to client slots, so who is covering which account is a record rather than an arrangement. Projects carry a category and a status, and the work logged against them is what invoices are built from.
Invoices that build themselves
Lines drawn from logged work and additional hours, with payments recorded against them and the balance always current. Invoices render as PDFs from the same data, so what the client receives and what the ledger holds cannot drift apart.
Expenses, recurring costs and assets
Categorised expenses including the ones that repeat on their own schedule, and a company asset register where every item has a status and, when it is out with somebody, an assignment showing who has it.
Three currencies, one truth
Sterling, rupees and dollars throughout, with exchange rates stored rather than fetched at read time. A figure from March still converts the way it did in March, which is the difference between a report and a guess.
Every change on the record
Creates, updates and deletes are written to an audit log against the person who made them. When a total looks wrong six months later, the question of what changed and who changed it has an answer instead of an argument.
What it is
built with.
Chosen for how long it will stay supportable, not for what was interesting that year. Everything below is in production in this project today.
The work this involved
Platform
Next.jsReactTypeScriptPrismaPostgreSQLDocker
Interface
Tailwind CSSshadcn/uiBase UIRechartsReact Table
Documents
React PDFPDF text extractionGenerated payslips & invoices
Correctness
Zod validationVitestPlaywrightAppend-only audit log
Something like this,
for your business.
Proactive ERP started as somebody describing a process that had stopped working. If that sounds familiar, that is all we need to start.
Discovery and written scope - free, and yours to keep