Frontend development in Birmingham
Clients of Birmingham's law and accountancy firms now expect to upload documents, check progress and sign things without phoning anyone, and many firms have bolted a portal onto their practice management system to offer it. The portal is often the weakest part of the client's experience: slow, confusing on a phone, and asking for the same information twice.
We build frontends in React and Next.js that sit on top of the systems you already have. A clear view of where a matter or a return stands, uploads that work on a phone, forms that remember what the client has already told you, and plain language instead of internal jargon. We design for the least technical client you have, test with keyboard and screen reader as we go, and leave a component library your team can extend.
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.
We measure on real devices and real traffic first, not a lab score on a fast laptop. The fix is usually less JavaScript: a smaller bundle, images sized for the screen, and third-party scripts that stop blocking the first render.
A procurement checklist, a customer complaint, or a letter from a lawyer. We fix the causes rather than the line items: real buttons, labelled forms, focus that lands somewhere sensible, and automated checks in CI so it stays fixed.
Global state that everything reads, no types, and three versions of the same modal. We add TypeScript file by file, put tests on the flows that make money, and move shared pieces into one component library as screens are touched.
Usually for search visibility or first-load speed. We move it route by route behind the same URLs, so the old app keeps serving while the new one takes over, and nobody has to sign off a risky weekend cut-over.
A Next.js web app with five operational dashboards and Tableau reports rendered in place, without a second login.
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.
Do we need to move to Next.js?+
Not always. If the app sits behind a login and nobody finds it through search, a well-built React single-page app on Vite is simpler to host and easier to reason about. Next.js earns its keep when first load and search visibility matter, or when you want rendering close to the data. We will tell you which case you are before anyone rewrites a route.
Can you work from our Figma files?+
Yes, and we will ask questions about them. Designs rarely show the loading state, the empty state, the error, or what happens when a name is twice as long as the mock-up assumed. We raise those early and propose something, rather than inventing it quietly in code and leaving your designer to find out in review.
Will you build us a design system?+
We will build the one your product needs, which is usually smaller than people expect: design tokens, the components you actually use, and Storybook to show them. We extract it from the screens you already have rather than designing it in isolation, because a component library nobody migrates to is just a second way of doing things.
How do you handle accessibility?+
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA by default, test with a keyboard and a screen reader, and run automated checks in CI so regressions are caught before they ship. Automated tools find only part of the problem, so we also test the key journeys by hand: sign-up, checkout, and anything a user does every day.
Do you only do the front end, or the API as well?+
Either. A lot of front-end pain is really an API shaped for a different screen, and when that is the case we can fix both sides. If your backend team owns the API, we write down what the front end needs from it and agree the contract with them, rather than working around it in the browser.