Why we built our own CRM, and whether a custom build is right for you

I wanted one place to run the business. Contacts, quotes, invoices, payments, projects, files and email, all in one system, doing as much of the work on its own as possible.

That turned out to be surprisingly hard to buy. It isn't impossible, but every option I looked at fell into one of two camps. Either it did one thing well and needed four other subscriptions to do the rest, or it did everything and was priced for a company with a finance team and an IT department.

So we built our own. It's called Agency Manager, AKG runs on it, and here's why.

The trouble with five tools

Picture the usual setup: a CRM for contacts and deals, an accounting package for invoices, a project tool for the work, a shared drive for the files, and an inbox that holds the real story of every customer.

Each one is fine on its own. The trouble is the gaps between them. A quote gets accepted in one system and somebody retypes it as an invoice in another. A job finishes in the project tool and nobody tells accounts. A customer emails a question and it sits in one person's inbox, where the CRM can't see it. Every gap is a bit of manual work, and manual work is exactly what gets missed in a busy week.

Then there's the bill. Most of these tools charge per person, per month, and the features you actually want tend to sit a tier or two up. Add the lot together and a small team can be paying a fair amount every month for software that still doesn't talk to itself.

What one system lets you automate

When everything lives in one place, a lot can happen on its own, because the system can see the whole picture.

Email attaches itself to the right customer and the right deal, because the mailbox is mirrored into the CRM. Nobody files anything.

A quote gets accepted and becomes a project. The payment stages become invoices, and the staged payment plan prints on the document the client actually reads.

Follow-ups go out on their own and stop the moment the person replies, even when it's a colleague on the copy line who answers. The system checks twice, once before the email is queued and again just before it leaves, so nobody gets chased after they've already written back. It never sends on a weekend, and the weekend is Brisbane's.

Expenses go in with the GST kept apart, so the BAS isn't a weekend job either. Subscriptions log their own expense each period. Tasks, time and files sit on the project they belong to.

None of that is clever on its own. It works because it's all one system, so nothing has to be copied from one place to another.

So is a custom build right for you?

It might be. Custom software used to be something only large companies could justify. That's changed a lot in the last couple of years, and a system built around how your business actually works is more within reach than you might think.

I'd take a serious look if you're paying for several tools and still retyping between them, or if your quoting is specific to what you do, like engineering calculations or configured products, and lives in a spreadsheet the CRM can't see. Same if your workarounds have names, like the Friday export, Jenny's tracker or the second spreadsheet that checks the first.

If you do go down that path, go in with a few things sorted.

Write your process down first, from enquiry to paid invoice, and who does what. A custom system will automate whatever you give it, bad habits included, so fix the process on paper before anything gets built.

Make sure you own it: the code, the data and the accounts it runs on. If the person who built it disappears, you should still have your business.

Plan for looking after it. When Google or a payment provider changes something, somebody has to update it. Budget for that the way you'd budget for servicing a machine.

And start with the part that hurts most. You don't have to replace everything at once. One custom piece connected to what you already use can take out the worst of the retyping on its own.

Why it was worth it for us

For AKG it came down to two things. I wanted the business to run with as little admin as possible, and I wanted to see everything about a customer on one screen, from the first email to the last invoice. I couldn't find that at a price that made sense, so we built it, and it's why custom tools are part of what we offer.

How we help with this: Integrations, tracking and custom tools →