Custom software development in Birmingham
Nobody in Birmingham needs persuading that a large system bought and then heavily customised can go badly wrong. The better lesson from the council's Oracle programme is about scale: the smaller and more specific a piece of software is, the easier it is to test, to change and to throw away if it turns out to be wrong.
That is how we approach custom software. We build tools for the processes that are genuinely yours, a referral queue, an approvals workflow, a job costing screen, and connect them to the systems you already run through their supported interfaces instead of changing those systems from the inside. Each piece ships in weeks, with the people who use it involved from the first demo. If a product on the market does the job, we will say so before writing anything.
Birmingham's software buyers are mostly not software companies. The city runs on financial and professional services: HSBC UK's head office at Centenary Square, the Birmingham office Goldman Sachs opened in 2021 with a technology focus, and the accountancy and law firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill. What they bring us is internal systems rather than consumer products: client portals, case and matter management, reporting that currently takes a week of spreadsheets, and integrations between platforms that different departments bought at different times.
Construction, transport and manufacturing make up the rest. HS2's Curzon Street terminus and the regeneration around it keep engineering consultancies, contractors and their supply chains busy, and those firms run on drawings, inspections, documents and project controls spread across too many tools. Manufacturing brings its own lesson. The 2025 cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover stopped production at its West Midlands plants for weeks and reached deep into the supplier base, and suppliers now want business systems they can restore quickly and integrations that pick up cleanly when they come back.
The city has also watched its council's Oracle programme. The Register reports a forecast cost of £144.4 million against an original estimate of around £19 million, with the finance system still not working as intended. The lesson local buyers draw is the right one: customise less, test the money flows before go-live, and keep the people who use the system in the room. Hiring is competitive but cheaper than London, and the banks and professional firms compete for the same engineers. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at £70,000 over the six months to September 2026.
Working with us from Birmingham needs no adjustment on your side. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up and the decisions that follow happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon runs on written updates and pull requests in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of work: an integration, a replacement for the spreadsheet, a portal with a deadline, or the groundwork before your own hire starts. We add senior capacity within days, begin with a fixed-price two-week piece so you can judge the output, and work white-label under your name for agencies.
Four ways this arrives.
Approvals, schedules or stock, tracked in a shared file with colour codes only one person understands. We turn it into an application with proper records, permissions and history, so you can see who changed what and when, and nobody works from an old copy.
Staff copy data from one system into another by hand, and the two slowly drift apart. We connect them through their APIs, clean up the data where it crosses over, and alert someone when a sync fails instead of letting it fail quietly.
The numbers exist, spread across exports and inboxes, and someone assembles a report by hand every Monday. We pull them into one place, build the dashboard the people making decisions will actually open, and check it is current rather than trusting the job that feeds it.
A legacy application still runs the business and every change to it is a risk. We map what it really does, move it piece by piece onto something maintainable, and keep both running until the last piece has landed. No weekend cut-over.
A facilities operations platform for a healthcare estate, built so supervisors can see what is overdue and what keeps coming back without exporting spreadsheets by hand.
Read the write-up →Asked by Birmingham teams.
How do you work with teams in Birmingham?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Birmingham morning, so stand-up and the day's decisions happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon carries on in pull requests and written updates you can read when you are back at your desk, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Birmingham law and accountancy firms?+
Yes. For the firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill we build client portals that work on a phone and ask for each piece of information once, matter and case management tools, and reports that assemble themselves instead of taking a week of spreadsheets. For accountancy practices we build AI features that pull figures from bank statements and receipts, suggest categories and put the result in front of an accountant to approve.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Birmingham?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at around £70,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum engagement. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. Most clients begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, which lets you judge us on working software before committing to more.
Should we replace our ERP or build around it?+
Usually build around it, at least first. Birmingham has seen what heavy customisation can cost. Most of the pain sits in the gaps between an ERP and the rest of the business, and every customisation makes the ERP harder to upgrade. We build small tools alongside it that talk to it through supported interfaces. If replacement is genuinely the answer, we will say so and set out what to test before go-live.
Why not buy an off-the-shelf tool?+
Often you should, and we will tell you when. If a product already does most of what you need, configuring it is cheaper than building. Custom software earns its cost when the process is how you compete, when you pay for several tools to do one job badly, or when the workarounds cost more staff time than the software would.
Can you work with the systems we already have?+
That is usually the job. Most internal tools are valuable because of what they connect to: an ERP, a work-order system, a CRM, a finance package. If it has an API, we integrate with it. If all it offers is a nightly export, we can work with that too, and we will tell you how fresh the data can honestly be.
How do you find out what we actually need?+
By talking to the people who do the work, not only the people who asked for the tool. We watch the spreadsheet being used, collect the edge cases everyone handles from memory, and write the process down before we build anything. The first release covers the core of it; the exceptions follow once people are using it.
What happens to our old data?+
It comes with you. We migrate it, check the counts and totals against the source, and keep the old system or spreadsheet readable until your team is confident nothing was lost. Where the old data is inconsistent, we show you the records that do not fit rather than quietly guessing what they meant.
Who looks after it once it is live?+
You choose. We can stay on at our hourly rate for changes and fixes, or hand it to your own team with runbooks, architecture notes and a recorded walkthrough. Internal tools change as the business changes, so we build them to be changed by someone other than us.