Case study

Replacing a split Access database

A whole business in Access, a half-finished low-code rebuild, and the one person who understood it about to leave. This one's running as I write, so it's a live example, not a polished success story.

184Forms

126Reports

515Saved queries

68Tables

What we walked into

A UK testing and compliance business had run on a split Access database for many years: quotes, projects, engineer scheduling, report tracking, invoicing, HR, health and safety. Part of it had already moved to a low-code platform on a cloud SQL Server database. Then the developer who built that left.

So there were two systems. Nobody could change one of them, and only one member of staff fully understood the other. That person was leaving within a few weeks.

We're not naming them, because the inside of a client's systems is theirs to talk about, not ours.

What was hiding in there

None of this is unusual. It's what years of sensible quick fixes look like.

Pretend jobs
Holidays and sickness were recorded as bookings on a made-up internal job.
Pretend employees
Test equipment was set up as staff, so it could be booked like a person.
Double-booking by eye
Nothing stopped it. The planner added up the days, and people knew to look for a total above one.
Odd arithmetic
A May to April financial year, and some figures cut off at two decimal places rather than rounded.
Reports nobody trusted
Around 20 no longer worked, and several queries had specific years typed into them.

Write it down first.

Get any of those rules wrong and the new reports won't match the old ones. So before anything was rebuilt, we went through every table, form, report and saved query and turned it into a written reference.

The new system is being agreed in fortnightly rounds with the people who use it every day, so the hidden rules come out before anything's built on top of them.

Where it stands

The knowledge is written down, so it no longer depends on one person. Quoting went first because it's the commercial heart of the business. Jobs, scheduling and engineer allocation are being built now, with double-booking prevented by the system instead of spotted by eye.

It's standard PHP and MySQL, on hosting the client controls, documented so that any competent PHP developer could pick it up. Nothing exotic and nothing locked to a vendor. It's theirs.

The low-code rebuild didn't fail because low-code is bad. It failed because it swapped one person who understood the system for another. Whatever you replace Access with, make sure the knowledge ends up written down, not just moved.
Rob Sherwood, co-founder