Custom software in Girona: what to automate first and what it costs

There's a moment that repeats itself across companies in the Girona area: the process works, but it works because somebody is holding it together by hand. A spreadsheet only one person understands, data typed twice because the invoicing system and the orders system don't talk, and a high season that multiplies office work without the office growing. That's the point where custom software in Girona stops being a tech indulgence and becomes an hours calculation.

What custom software is, and how you can tell

It's a program built around your specific process instead of an off-the-shelf one designed for everybody. We don't adapt your company to the software: we adapt the software to how you actually work, which is almost never how the manual describes it.

You notice it in three ways. First, you don't pay for features you never use, and the ones you need aren't missing. Second, it connects to what you already have — the website, the invoicing, the CRM — so information travels on its own. And third, the code is yours: it isn't tied to a third-party component that one day decides to raise its price.

Signs your company already needs it

No complicated diagnosis required. If three of these four sound familiar, the problem is already costing you money:

• The same data gets typed twice or more: on the order, on the delivery note and again on the invoice.
• There's a critical spreadsheet only one person understands, and nobody dares touch it when that person is away.
• Reports are assembled by hand every Monday, copying from two or three different places.
• In high season you hire someone for admin, not to produce or to serve customers.

That last point is the most expensive and the best disguised. Hiring admin cover every summer costs more, year after year, than building the tool that removes the work.

What comes up most often in Girona companies

The province mixes seasonal tourism, food and agriculture, supplier industry, distribution and a lot of technical services. You can look up the municipal and county profile on Idescat's municipality in figures. In practice, the projects that come in look rather alike.

Season: when July multiplies the office work

Accommodation, restaurants, boating, activities and everything around the Costa Brava share the same pattern: nine quiet months and three where everything spikes. The hard part isn't usually serving customers, it's what comes behind: reconciling bookings from three different channels, tracking consumption, putting staff timesheets together and invoicing without mistakes. A panel of your own that pulls those inputs into one place and produces the paperwork by itself frees up hours exactly when there aren't any.

Goods that move: fields, warehouse and delivery

The Empordà and the Gironès are full of companies that buy, transform and deliver. Here the pain is the mismatch: stock that doesn't add up, paper delivery notes arriving late at the office, batches that have to be traceable. A simple app on the warehouse phone or tablet, logging goods in and out on the spot and updating stock, is usually the first piece built, because it's the one you notice soonest.

Workshops and field service: the paper job sheet

Installers, maintenance, repairs, construction. The technician writes on a paper job sheet, the office types it up, it gets invoiced three weeks later and half the hours never make it onto an invoice because nobody wrote them down. Digitising that sheet, with the customer's signature and photos, and having the invoice come out of it, changes the month's numbers without changing the payroll.

Off-the-shelf or custom: how to decide

Not everything is solved by building. If your process is the standard one in your sector and there's a well-known program covering it, buy it: it's cheaper and it's proven. The conversation changes when one of these three shows up:

• Nothing fits and you've spent two years patching it with a spreadsheet on the side.
• You pay for several licences and still copy data between them by hand.
• The way you work is your advantage and the off-the-shelf program forces you to work like everyone else.

There's a middle option we recommend more often than you'd think: keep the program you already have and build only the missing piece, connected to it. It's cheaper and less risky than throwing everything out and starting over.

What custom software costs in Girona

There's no price list here, and be wary of anyone who gives you one over the phone. Custom software goes by project, not by monthly fee: the price depends on what has to be built, and it's agreed in writing before anything starts. We quote after a first conversation where the process gets mapped out, because until then any figure is a made-up number.

What is published are the monthly digital presence plans, which are a different thing and sometimes get confused: from €100 a month for a landing page and €200 for a site of up to ten pages, plus plans at €400, €750 and €1,500 a month for content, your Google profile and campaigns. All of it is on our pricing page, VAT excluded and with no lock-in. Development is quoted separately.

One piece of advice we always give: ask for the project in slices. A first version that solves the part that hurts most, with a closed price, and from there you decide whether to continue. Better to spend a little and see it work than to sign a twelve-month project blind.

How long it takes and how the work goes

It depends on the size, but the order is nearly always the same:

• Understand the real process. One or two sessions, preferably on site and with the people doing the work, not only the ones managing it.
• Build the first useful version. A few weeks, with just enough for somebody to genuinely use it rather than a pretty demo.
• Use it and fix it. This is where the things nobody mentioned in the meeting appear, and they're half the value of the project.
• Extend it in slices, once the previous one is bedded in.

We train the team when it's ready and keep maintaining it afterwards. Internal software nobody maintains decays the same way an abandoned website does, only it shows up later and hurts more.

What to put in writing before starting

• Who owns the code and where it's hosted. The correct answer is that it's yours and you have the access.
• How your data is exported the day you want to take it elsewhere. If nobody can answer, that's a bad start.
• What maintenance covers and what gets billed separately.
• Who trains the team and what material the company keeps.
• Per-person logins, backups somebody actually checks and up-to-date security patches. It sounds obvious and it's the first thing missing.

If it's going to issue invoices, read this before building

Any development that issues invoices has to meet the requirements the Spanish tax agency sets for invoicing software systems. It's worth knowing before the first line of code, because retrofitting costs considerably more than designing for it. If your project only handles orders or job sheets and invoices still come out of your existing program, this doesn't affect you: what gets connected is the data, not the obligation.

For questions about paperwork, grants and obligations, the Catalan government runs Canal Empresa, a good starting point before paying for advice on something already published.

Grants: the Kit Digital

Part of the digitalisation can be covered by public grants if your company meets the requirements. We're a registered digitalising agent and can handle the paperwork, but we say it quietly: a grant helps, it doesn't decide. If the project doesn't stand up without a subsidy, it usually wasn't the right project.

Working with someone half an hour away

Our office is in Palamós and we work with companies in Girona, Figueres, Palafrugell, Olot, Blanes and Banyoles, as well as Barcelona. In development, having the provider nearby matters at two specific moments: when the process has to be seen where it happens — the warehouse, the reception desk, the workshop — and when something breaks in high season and you can't wait for a ticket to be opened.

The rest works fine remotely and usually moves faster. You talk to the person writing the code, the budget is closed before work starts and, if what you need isn't a development project but automating a couple of processes with what you already have, we'll say so even if it means billing less.