Case study · The Arts Hub

Five rented tools, one secure platform

A performing-arts school running on QuickBooks and a scatter of separate products. I replaced the lot with one system it controls, built around how it actually works.

The situation

The Arts Hub carried QuickBooks plus a scattering of separate products for staff details, timesheets, tasks, payment tracking, bank categorisation, member management and family invoicing. Vendor sprawl of the ordinary kind: each subscription reasonable on its own, the whole a mess of duplicated records and manual re-keying between systems.

And sensitive data throughout, including children's medical and emergency information, sitting on an incumbent platform that was not interested in offering multi-factor authentication when asked. Twice.

What I built

One controlled platform, shaped around the real work rather than bought off a shelf:

• Staff and member records, with encrypted personal data and a privacy-safe audit history.
• Timesheets, an approval workflow, and Isle of Man payroll registers.
• Banking: import, categorisation that learns from past decisions, reconciliation, and a tax-return report that is honest about what bank data alone can't establish — replacing the accounting product for the job it was actually used for.
• Member management: families, students, classes, registers, attendance and messaging.
• Invoicing with card payments and Direct Debit, verified with the provider before anything is marked paid.
• Notifications through the organisation's existing email domain — one less vendor, not one more.

How

Business analysis first, to work out what genuinely needed building. Claude read through the existing accounts and data to establish a practical model; Codex did the engineering across the whole platform — code, migrations, tests, deployment. AI accelerated the build. It did not make the decisions that mattered: what to hold, what never to automate, what to encrypt, and what a person must review by hand before it counts.

The outcome

199 families, 257 students and 2,460 historic invoices migrated cleanly across from the old system. Five rented tools reduced to one platform the organisation controls. Multi-factor authentication, encryption at rest, encrypted backups and no stored banking credentials, behind a private tunnel with no open ports.

The lesson

Established products are still the right call most of the time. But when a tool is expensive, frustrating, or used for a fraction of what it does, a focused internal tool built around the actual workflow can be the better fit, and now the cheaper one to build.