The challenge
Small businesses needed quick document and calculation tools — invoices, quotes, VAT, margins — without signing up for eight different subscription services.
Objectives
- Ship a set of genuinely useful tools that run in the browser
- Share one backend and admin layer across all of them
- Keep hosting costs low enough for shared hosting
- Make the whole thing testable rather than hand-checked
What we built
A multi-tool platform on a shared PHP and MySQL backend: invoice, receipt, quote and estimate generators, a solar sizing calculator, VAT and profit margin calculators, and PDF utilities, all behind one admin dashboard.
Technology
Automated testing · JavaScript · MySQL · PHP
How it was delivered
- Shared PHP/MySQL backend with a common admin dashboard
- Eight independent tools built on the same foundation
- Automated test suite of several hundred assertions
- Optimised to run comfortably on shared hosting
- Each tool built to work without an account
Outcomes
- Eight tools live on one codebase and one admin
- Regression testing is automated rather than manual
- Runs within the limits of standard shared hosting
- New tools can reuse the existing backend and admin