There is one very specific moment when a small company starts thinking about custom software in L'Hospitalet, and it is almost never because they fancy modernising. It is when they come on board as a supplier to somebody much bigger and discover that working with that client means doing things their way.
A city of suppliers pressed up against large companies
L'Hospitalet has 292,161 inhabitants in twelve square kilometres, and two worlds share that handkerchief. On one side, thousands of small companies. On the other, the large workplaces: 21,830 registered jobs are in workplaces of 50 to 249 employees and another 15,885 in workplaces of ten to forty-nine. The figures come from Idescat's municipality-in-figures portal.
Add that the property, technical and administrative activities block generates 2,285 million euros of added value a year and that the city's GDP is around 7,968 million. In plain terms: plenty of mid-sized companies buying services from plenty of small ones, almost always less than ten minutes away.
And that is where the problem this article is about shows up.
What happens when you become a large company's supplier in L'Hospitalet
It gets announced as good news, and it is. But three things arrive with the contract:
The portal where everything has to be uploaded
Every large client has its own. Orders through one, delivery notes through another, invoices through a third. If you also sell to the public sector, the invoice goes through Spain's general entry point for electronic invoices, with its format and its registry. None of it is optional.
The formats and the deadlines
References in their coding, units counted their way, delivery notes numbered a particular way, the invoice before the fifth. Each requirement on its own is manageable; eight together are half of somebody's day.
The traceability that ends up needing custom software
Which batch went out, who packed it, when it was delivered and who signed. When the large client audits, that information has to exist. If it lives in the warehouse manager's head, it does not exist.
The outcome repeats itself: one person spending hours copying between your program and theirs, and a bottleneck that grows with every new client.
What custom software gets built in these cases, and in what order
- The bridge to the portal. The order comes into your system and the delivery note and invoice go out to theirs without being typed twice. That is what gives the most hours back.
- Numbering and formats, handled by the program rather than by somebody's memory.
- Minimum traceability: batch, date, person responsible and delivery signature, stored automatically.
- Alerts: if something is rejected at the portal or a deadline is approaching, it should fire before the client calls.
- The weekly panel: what has been delivered, what is awaiting payment and what has been rejected.
Four of those five are not a new program: they are connections between what you already have. That is also what process automation is about, and it is often solved there without building anything large.
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Buy or build, with one nuance that changes everything here
Our usual rule: if a market tool covers ninety per cent of it, buy it. But this scenario carries a nuance. What the large client asks for is not your choice, and off-the-shelf tools are designed for the general case, not for one particular client's particular format.
Which is why the usual answer here is not replacing your management software but putting a custom piece on top that talks to the client's portal. It costs less, it is done sooner and it forces no migration. The full criteria are in when custom software pays off.
What not to build
- A whole ERP. If the existing one works, connect it rather than bin it.
- A development for a client you have not signed yet. Wait for the contract.
- Pretty reports nobody will look at. First make the data exist and be reliable.
- Whatever the client will change in six months. If they warn you they are migrating portals, do not build against the old one.
The legal part nobody looks at until it arrives
When you handle your client's data —or their clients' data— you stop being just a supplier and start processing information on somebody else's behalf. That gets signed. Spain's data protection agency publishes guidelines for those contracts, and they are worth reading before signing rather than after.
And another one that gets skipped: if the development touches invoicing, there are technical requirements to meet. Worth checking before building rather than once it is done.
How long it takes and what you need to provide
A bridge to a portal, with its formats and its alerts, is built in weeks. What sets the pace is not the programming: it is the exceptions. The client who wants a different delivery note, the item billed by weight rather than by unit, the month they change the coding.
Three things are needed from your side: the person who does the work by hand today, access to both systems, and the client's specifications in writing. With that we start.
What custom software in L'Hospitalet costs
This service carries no monthly fee. Our pricing page puts it this way: custom software, process automation, AI integration and training and the AI audit are quoted per project, with a fixed price agreed in writing before starting. The price depends on what has to be built, and you know it before we begin.
What does have published rates is the website and presence side: €100 a month for the landing, €200 for the site with up to ten subpages and €400, €750 and €1,500 for the presence plans. Excluding VAT and with no lock-in.
A sense of the order of magnitude without inventing figures: it almost always comes out well below the annual cost of the person now spending half their day copying data, and that is the comparison worth making.
What to get in writing
- That the code is yours and where it is stored.
- What happens if the client changes portals and what adapting it would cost.
- Who answers if the bridge stops working one day, and how quickly.
- The access credentials, in your company's name rather than the supplier's.
We are stubborn about that last one, with reason: who owns your domain covers what happens when somebody else holds the keys.
We work from Palamós, with companies across the metropolitan area
We are based in Palamós and look after companies in L'Hospitalet and across the Barcelona area. Understanding a process takes sitting down once with whoever does it every day, and we hold that meeting there; building, testing and adjusting works just as well from here. To see how we handle the rest, there is digital marketing in L'Hospitalet and web design in L'Hospitalet.
This week's check
Take your largest client's order and follow its journey: how many times the same piece of data gets typed from arrival to payment. If the answer is three or more, there is your project and there is the saving.
Send us that journey on WhatsApp, even in four lines. We will tell you whether it can be connected, with what, and whether it is worth it. No strings, same day.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.