built to order
Custom software development company for New York firms
Most of what we get asked for in New York sits in finance and insurance: an AS/400 running policy administration, a batch that has to finish before the open, a model in VBA that three desks depend on and one person understands. We take all three, and we have taken them before.
NYC
18 days to a first working version
Shadow IT is struck through because it does not get ported. Once the process has an owner and a log, the private copies stop being worth maintaining.
Spreadsheets
Excel, an Access file, and a reconciliation someone does by hand each morning.
- spreadsheet + emailExcel · Outlook
- access.mdbAccess
- manual reconciliationpeople
- shadow ITunowned
A service
One domain service, one web client, a schema with migrations, an append-only log.
- domain serviceGo
- web clientTypeScript
- postgresschema + migrations
- audit logappend-only
18 days to a first working version
What New York adds on top
- The calendar is not ours
- A settlement cycle, a monthly close, a reporting deadline set by someone else. The cutover plan is built around that calendar rather than around our phases: a batch that has to finish before the open is not something you switch over on a Tuesday because a sprint ended.
- Parallel running against your recorded output
- Old and new run the same job on the same inputs and are compared to the cent before anything takes over. For a month-end job we replay the month you already recorded rather than wait for the next one, so a quarterly close does not add a quarter to the project.
- An audit trail that survives a regulator
- Append-only logs, who changed what and when, and a comparison report kept as evidence. Examiners at FINRA, the SEC and NYDFS ask for the reasoning behind a number, not just the number, and a rewrite that cannot produce the old answer alongside the new one fails that question.
- The AS/400 nobody wants to touch
- Policy administration on RPG, green screens the operators are faster on than any web client, DDS-described files with twenty years of REDEFINES. We move the job streams one at a time, keep the keyboard-first flow the operators actually use, and leave the screens working until the replacement is provably identical.
- The model three desks depend on
- A spreadsheet with VBA that one person maintains and nobody has tested. It becomes a service with a schema, a test suite built from the historical results it already produced, and an owner who is not one person's laptop. This is the single most common request we get in this city.
- Presence is a budget line
- If your rules require a badge, someone is in the building for the parts that need it — cutover weekends, the sessions where operators show what they actually do. That goes into the SOW as days, priced, rather than as an open-ended promise to be available.
How the work goes
- 01days 1–2
Watch the work happen
We sit with the people doing it and read the formulas in their spreadsheet. The exceptions they handle without thinking are the ones that break a build on day fifteen.
- 02days 2–5
Model the data and settle the rules
Schema, states, who is allowed to change what. This is where the arguments happen, and having them here costs a fraction of having them the day before you go live.
- 03days 4–12
Build one path end to end
A complete path from input to report, in production, used by people who do the job. A demo environment tells you nothing about whether the thing is usable.
- 04days 11–18
Migrate and turn the old file off
Import the history, run both for a period, then remove write access to the spreadsheet. A system nobody is required to leave never gets left.
What the platform does, what a person does
| What the platform does, what a person does | Who does it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Reading the existing Access queries and Excel formulas | Platform | They come out as readable rules anyone in the room can confirm at a glance. |
| Deciding which rules are real and which are habits | Engineer | Only your people know that the Tuesday exception exists because of one supplier. |
| Service, schema and migrations | Platform | Generated from the agreed model, then reviewed line by line before it lands. |
| The screens people live in | Both | The daily path gets designed by a person. The admin forms around it do not need one. |
| Importing and reconciling the history | Both | Loading is mechanical. Deciding what to do with rows that never balanced is not. |
| Cutover plan | Engineer | Which date, who is on call, what the rollback is. |
The team that builds it
More than ten years on other people's systems and dozens of migrations delivered: Access and Excel processes, VB6 and Delphi clients, PHP monoliths, AS/400 policy administration, plant floors held together by macros. Scheduling, claims, billing, inventory, dispatch, reporting. We have built all of it before, and the shape of the work repeats far more than anyone expects.
The assessment is the cheap way to see this for yourself. Bounded work with a written output: the data model as we understand it, the rules we pulled out of your spreadsheet, and a phased plan with prices against it.
Questions we get from engineers
- Our deadline is a settlement date, not a sprint. Does that work?
- That is the normal case here and the plan is built around it. Phases end at moments your calendar allows a change, the comparison run finishes before the window rather than during it, and nothing takes over a job until it has produced the same output as the old one on your own recorded traffic.
- Can you work inside our network, and what about our security review?
- Inside your VPN is the usual arrangement, and for regulated work the models come from us and run air-gapped inside your perimeter, on your hardware or on hardware we rent you. We do not hold SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA or PCI certification and will write exactly that on the questionnaire — what we can do is make sure nothing about your code leaves the building.
- Will an examiner accept a rewritten system?
- What they ask for is evidence, and evidence is what the parity harness produces: the same inputs through both systems, differences at zero or written down and signed off. That report is yours, and it is the document that answers the question a year later when nobody remembers the project.
- We are on an AS/400 and our operators are faster on the green screens.
- They usually are, and that is a requirement rather than a complaint. The replacement is keyboard-first and the flow stays the one they know; a mouse-driven redesign is how a migration that works on paper fails at the desk. The 5250 screens stay up until the new path is provably identical.
- How fast can you start, and how long until something is live?
- Within about two days of a signed statement of work, and the assessment can run while contracting finishes. Eighteen days to a first working version is the budget for this service, thirty days is the ceiling on any project we take, and the phase plan tells you which piece lands when.
Show us the spreadsheet
Send the shape of the process and how many people touch it. Back comes what the assessment covers, how long the build takes and what it costs. Eighteen days later it is running.
The first reply comes from an engineer, usually asking who owns the process today.