Alex Kovacic

Custom business web apps

Orders, stock, jobs, invoices, shifts. The software follows your company's rules, runs in the browser, in the office and on the road, and changes when you do.

When it makes sense

It usually starts with a spreadsheet that has grown too big, or with off-the-shelf software that makes you work its way. The CRM I use for my own business replaced a spreadsheet with 18 tabs.

Custom software makes sense when the rules are yours: a price list with three prices for every variant, a quote where the margin only shows in the office, price files arriving every day from every shop. If standard invoicing software like everyone else's is enough for you, buy that: it costs less.

What it can do

Whatever you need. The business apps I have built include, for example:

  • quotes put together line by line, with markup and discount, and a PDF ready to send;
  • products with size and colour variants, and supplier price lists imported from Excel with a preview;
  • Italian e-invoices read from fatturapa.com with their SDI status, and payments matched from the bank statement;
  • files arriving over FTP, checked and transformed by rules before they go on to another system;
  • an email alert when an overnight job gets stuck;
  • connections to WooCommerce, eBay and Vinted.

In the browser, on phones too

It runs in any browser, with nothing to install on the office computers. The same apps install on a phone as a PWA; the gokalex CRM also has a page for when there is no signal.

How it's built

PHP 8 with MySQL or MariaDB. SitePing is built on Laravel 13. The Dracartys CRM is plain PHP with no framework, made for ordinary cPanel hosting: you upload it and it works, and the database updates itself.

If you don't have a server, I set one up and look after it: see Servers and hosting. If one day you want to move to another provider, I give you the code and the database.

Work of this kind

  • CRM Dracartys: quotes, variants and price lists for a company that personalises products.
  • AREAVISION: the system between the shops and the electronic shelf label cloud.
  • CRM gokalex: invoices, payments and renewals for my own business.

We start by looking at how you work today: spreadsheets, handovers, exceptions. The next steps are in Process.

Problems I often solve