It began modestly: project management lived in a patchwork of Excel files, and the client wanted a clean overview. We evaluated their existing CRM and advised against repurposing it; Notion was the better home for knowledge and project work.
Then the scope drifted: first projects should be visible internally, then sales partners should see status, then their customers too. Notion is excellent, but its permissions are deliberately coarse — you can share a page, not a single column of it, and not reliably hide the rest. The requirement had outgrown the tool.
The requirement had outgrown the tool
Rather than bend the business to a product, we designed a clean system landscape. We defined leading systems — which system may change what, and where — and integrated Notion, the CRM and Google Workspace through their well-maintained APIs.
Does this sound familiar?
If standard tools are hitting similar limits for you, let's look together in a free first conversation at what a fitting system landscape could look like for you.
A portal that carries almost no logic of its own
On top we built a lean web app as a customer portal with its own database, synchronising bidirectionally with the systems behind it via webhooks and creating customer folders automatically. The portal carried almost no logic of its own; it orchestrated what the connected systems already knew.
The software adapts to the process, not the other way round.
That is precisely why it was fast to build and easy to maintain.
80% cheaper, 100% tailored
The result is an integrated landscape where every project is named the same everywhere and every user is permissioned down to the column — each sees only what they should. A customer portal that a few years ago would have cost a mid five-figure sum was delivered in a few weeks, part-time, roughly 80% cheaper than classic custom development — with no licence fees; hosting in the first month cost €5.11.
More important than the price is the principle: this company's competitive advantage lies in its excellent process — and that is exactly what the software preserves, instead of sacrificing it to a standard package.
Three things you can take away
- Don't bend the business to the tool. When a requirement pushes a standard tool past its limits, the answer usually isn't switching tools — it's a clean system landscape.
- Orchestrate instead of duplicating. A portal with no business logic of its own is fast to build and stays easy to maintain, because it only surfaces what the connected systems already know.
- Granularity isn't a luxury. Permissions down to the column level open up business models — here, insight for sales partners and their customers — that standard permissions could never support.