Flagship build
Leads, contracts, e-signatures, invoicing and a client portal — one platform I designed, built, secured, and use every day. Not a concept. Not a demo. Production software running a real business.
The invoice you'd receive from me is generated by it. The portal you'd log into is it.
Why I built it
Quotes live in email. Contracts live in a Google Doc. Invoices live in a spreadsheet. Payments get chased over WhatsApp. The client has no idea where anything stands — and neither do you.
So I stopped stitching tools together and built one system that runs the entire engagement lifecycle end to end — the same back office a small studio would pay for, tailored to exactly how I work.
What I built
Not a landing page with a login. A complete back office where every part knows about the others.
Capture inbound enquiries, qualify them, and track each one through the pipeline.
The spine of the system — every project is a record linking its client, documents, invoices and messages.
Proposals and agreements go out as secure links clients sign in the browser — no account required.
Branded PDF invoices with gapless per-year numbering, live statuses and reminders.
Clients log in to see their project, documents, invoices and messages in one calm place.
Stripe checkout with webhook-driven payment status that stays correct even when events retry.
Threaded, per-engagement communication so nothing important is buried in an inbox.
Admin, member and client roles with invitations and one-click revocation.
Tokenised feedback requests flow straight into curated, published testimonials.
Productised offerings that seed proposals and keep pricing consistent.
The public site's brand colours are database-driven and editable from the admin — no redeploy.
Projects and the blog on this very site are managed from the same admin.
The lifecycle
Enquiry captured & qualified
Project record created
Proposal e-signed in-browser
Branded PDF issued
Stripe checkout & status
Delivery & ongoing access
The hard parts
Anyone can build the screens. This is the part that makes the system trustworthy enough to run a business on.
The problemInvoice numbering is a legal and accounting requirement: no gaps, no reuse, and no editing a number once it's issued — even under concurrent requests.
How I solved itA per-year sequence (AD-2026-0001…) allocated atomically in Postgres, so two invoices can never collide. Issued invoices are immutable — you void, never delete — so the financial record stays trustworthy.
The problemAn admin, a team member and a client must see completely different slices of the same database — and a bug that leaks one client's data to another is unacceptable.
How I solved itEvery table is protected by row-level security policies, not app-layer checks that can be forgotten. The privileged service key never reaches the browser. I ran a security review and closed the findings, including tightening storage-bucket write rules.
The problemClients hate creating accounts just to sign a document or pay an invoice — but the data behind those links still has to be locked down.
How I solved itDocuments, invoices and feedback are reachable through unguessable tokenised links that scope access to exactly one record. Clients sign, pay and respond with zero friction; everything else stays private.
The problemStripe can deliver the same event twice, or out of order. A naive handler double-counts a payment or corrupts an invoice's status.
How I solved itWebhook handlers are idempotent — processing the same event twice is a no-op — so a payment is recorded exactly once and status transitions stay consistent no matter how the events arrive.
The problemInvites, invoices and notifications depend on email — but a mail-provider hiccup shouldn't block the actual business action.
How I solved itTransactional mail runs through the app's own mailer, decoupled from any single provider's SMTP, so sending is best-effort: the core action completes and the message follows.
The problemAn invoice has to look identical and on-brand for every client, regardless of their browser or device.
How I solved itInvoices render to PDF on the server, so the document a client downloads is pixel-consistent and branded every time — never dependent on client-side rendering.
A look inside
Built with
Chosen for correctness and longevity, not novelty.
Anyone can say they build software. Very few can hand you the live system that runs their own business and say: this is real, and it's mine. The professionalism you feel as my client — the branded invoice, the portal, the e-signed agreement — is this platform, working.