I pitched Qedy to a new customer, this time a Czech nonprofit association, who decided to diversify their suppliers in order to prevent a vendor lock. I'm very glad they saw a potential in what I do, so they welcomed me on board.
My responsibility is to build an internal intranet portal for the HQ, while they also maintain an IT system for their member organizations and plan to expand it to tens of thousands of their individual members.
The first task was to digitalize their mail room. They still use regular books with handwritten records, so this will be a major improvement. They also use Excel spreadsheets, which they exchange between departments to retype reference numbers, names and addresses to their own Excel spreadsheets, in which they work afterwards.
It's not just plain tables though, they had a guy who created simple vbs apps, but since he retired, they were looking for a replacement. And because one of their major problem was data sharing, they were OK with rebuilding all the Excel apps into a web app.
For me it's almost a routine, this is a fourth Qedy installment, where I recreated former Office app (Excel, Access). Don't get me wrong, I love Excel and it's capabilities, it's almost a "sandbox app" (in regards to "sandbox games"), but the trend moved on and for a good reason.
I had a quite long run-up, so I was able to do things properly over time, so even after the work orders started to rush in, I didn't have to create a tech debt and kept chugging away. I was even confident to offer more digitization of employee management, which was in paper books as well.
The advantage is most customers have very similar needs, so I already had such modules near completion from previous projects. So when this customer signed up for the module, I was able to offer both of them a fair discount on future modules, because I didn't feel it's fair to get paid twice for the same work.
I know it's a common practice, but honestly I'm more happy they were willing to pay for the development, when there are tons of similar apps out there and the competition is huge.