From spreadsheet exports to a platform 300 customers log into

The company moved freight for around forty B2B customers, and every one of them wanted to know where their shipments were. The answer lived in a transport system with no customer access, so the operations team exported spreadsheets, cleaned them up and emailed them out. Twice a day. For forty customers.

Onboarding a new customer took two weeks of setting up reports and explaining the columns. Growth made the problem worse, not better. Management wanted a customer portal; the sales team wanted something they could sell as a product.

We started with a discovery sprint and one uncomfortable question: was this a portal or a product? A portal would have solved the reporting problem. A product could become a second revenue line, but only if built as a multi-tenant platform from day one.

We recommended the product, with a strict first scope: shipment visibility, notifications and exports. No invoicing, no rate calculator, no mobile app in version one. The transport system stayed the source of truth; we synced from it rather than replacing it.

Version one shipped in fourteen weeks. Tenant isolation, roles and audit logging were built in the first month, because they are cheap early and expensive later. Every week the operations team used the preview environment with real data, which is how we found the exceptions no one had mentioned in the workshops.

Customers now log in and see their shipments live. Onboarding a new customer means creating an organisation and inviting users: two days, mostly spent on their side. Nine months after launch the platform serves more than three hundred customer accounts, and the company sells access as part of its contracts.

Support tickets about shipment status fell by more than half. The operations team stopped producing spreadsheets on the first day.

Next.js with TypeScript, PostgreSQL with Prisma, Better Auth for organisations and roles, Docker on an EU VPS, GitHub Actions for deployment. The client owns the repository and infrastructure, and an in-house developer now works alongside us on the roadmap.