Get a straight answer on your tech

IT consulting is advice on your technology from someone who looks before speaking. You bring a question, large or small; we look at how your business actually works and give you a plain, written answer you can act on.

It is not a sales visit dressed up as advice, where every problem happens to need the product being sold. It is not a thick report full of words nobody in the business uses. And it is not day-to-day IT support, such as fixing laptops or setting up printers, although we will tell you whether yours is working.

We have been building software since 2008, for businesses from shops to lenders and manufacturers. That matters for advice: we know what software takes to build, run and change, so we can tell a sensible quote from a wild one and a real risk from a theoretical one.

Advice pays off most just before a big decision. The moments we hear about most often are these: before buying an ERP or a CRM, before accepting a quote to rebuild an app, before hiring a first developer or a tech lead, and before signing a long software contract.

Other moments are warnings. Software and cloud bills climbing with no clear reason. A security scare, such as a hacked email account or a ransom note on a shared drive. The one person who knows how everything works handing in their notice. Investors or a buyer asking about your technology before a deal.

A short review at any of these points costs little next to a wrong choice that runs for years. And sometimes the answer is reassuring: what you have is fine, and here are the three small things to fix.

We look at five things: the software you use, your data, where it all runs, who has access, and what it costs. Software means everything from your accounting package and Tally to your website, CRM, spreadsheets with macros and the apps your team installed themselves.

For data, we ask where your customer, sales and stock records live, how many copies exist, which one is right and whether it is backed up. For where it runs, we look at office servers, hosting, cloud accounts and domains, and who pays for each. For access, we check who can sign in to what, whether leavers still can, and whether two-step sign-in is switched on.

For cost, we list every subscription, licence and hosting bill with its renewal date. The result is a map of your technology on one page, which many businesses have never seen.

Most of the review happens on screen-share and in short conversations, so your team keeps working. We ask for view-only access where we need it, and we never change anything during a review without asking.

We talk to the people who use the systems every day, not only to managers, because they know the workarounds: the spreadsheet kept on the side, the report that is always wrong, the step that is done twice. Conversations happen in English, Hindi or Gujarati, whichever people are comfortable with.

We work on India time, which overlaps with the working morning in Europe, and we set calls at the edges of our day for the Americas. A review of a single decision needs a few conversations; a full review spreads them over the agreed period.

The right answer is the cheapest one that solves the real problem for the next few years. Many businesses arrive with a quote to rebuild when a ready-made product would do, and others try to bend a product into something it will never be.

We compare the options on the things that matter: how well each fits the way you work, what it costs to buy or build and then to run over several years, how hard it is to leave, who owns your data, and whether your team can live with it. Where a ready-made product fits, we say so, including our own, such as Flare CRM for sales teams or Ember POS for billing and stock, and including other companies’ products when they fit better.

Sometimes the honest answer is neither: fix what you have, connect two tools that don’t talk, or stop doing a task nobody needs.

Most small-business security problems are basic, and fixing them costs little. Shared passwords, accounts belonging to people who left, two-step sign-in switched off, backups that have never been restored, a domain registered on a former employee’s personal card: these cause far more damage than clever attacks.

We check each of these and put them in order of risk. Many are fixed in an afternoon: a password manager for the team, two-step sign-in on email and banking, leavers removed, backups tested once. The plan names who owns each fix.

Where you hold sensitive data, such as payments, health records or children’s information, or where a customer or regulator asks for proof, we recommend deeper checks, such as penetration testing, as a separate step.

Most businesses pay for more software than they use. Subscriptions are added one at a time by different people, renew automatically and are rarely reviewed together.

We list every subscription, licence, hosting and domain bill with its renewal date and owner, then compare it with real use. The usual findings are seats for people who left, two tools doing the same job, plans larger than needed, and cloud servers left running after a project ended.

The result is a renewal calendar and a list of what to cut, combine or renegotiate, so the next renewal becomes a decision rather than a surprise.

Rules about tax and data shape what your systems must do, so we check them early. In India that can mean GST e-invoicing and e-way bills, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, CERT-In’s rules on reporting incidents and keeping logs, and RBI directions for lenders and payment businesses.

For customers abroad, the GDPR covers personal data of people in Europe and the UK, and health businesses often adopt HIPAA-style privacy controls. We map what each rule means in practice: which data you hold, where it lives, who can see it and what must be logged.

We work alongside your lawyers, chartered accountants and auditors. We explain the technology side clearly; they give the legal and tax advice, and nobody claims a certificate that wasn’t earned.

At the end you get a written plan in plain words, ordered by what matters most. It opens with a one-page summary any owner can read over a cup of tea, followed by the map of your systems and suppliers.

Each finding comes with a decision: keep, fix, replace or stop. Each decision comes with options, what each costs, how long it takes, what could go wrong and what happens if you leave it. Steps are sorted into now, next and later, with quick wins first.

Where a step needs a supplier, the plan includes the brief to send them and the questions to ask, so quotes can be compared fairly, whether one of them is ours or not.

Some businesses want a review once; others want someone to ask every month. As a part-time technology advisor, sometimes called a fractional CTO, we join a regular call, review plans and quotes, read contracts before they are signed, and help you hire or brief developers and suppliers.

It suits companies that have outgrown guesswork but are not ready for a full-time technology lead. When you are, we help you write the role, interview candidates and hand over everything we know.