Product2 min read
The Origin Story
nompany started with a spreadsheet: a sales team's invoices, exported at the end of every month and stacked January to December. This is the story of why we stopped rebuilding that picture by hand, and started building the system instead.
Every company we have worked with runs on two systems: the one it paid for, and the spreadsheets people build around it because the first one cannot answer their questions.
It started with an export
In 2016, we had a routine. At the end of each month, we exported the invoices, pasted them under the months before, and rebuilt two pivot tables: how many invoices each customer had that month, and how much they were worth.
Then came the part that mattered. We read each customer's last seven months as three blocks — the first three, the next three, and the month that had just closed — and judged each block zero, low, medium or high. Every shape had a name. A customer who bought, went quiet, then bought again was returning. One who bought steadily and then stopped was slipping. The team knew who to call, and why.
It worked. It also took a day every month, and it was out of date the morning after.
The problem was never the spreadsheet
The spreadsheet was only a symptom. Sales kept its customers in one place, Finance its invoices in another, and projects, stock and people somewhere else again. Every question that crossed a department meant somebody typing the same thing twice, and two copies of a number are two numbers free to disagree.
So, we built one system
nompany is an ERP for small and medium companies across the region: every department on one data model, so work moves from one team to the next without anybody typing it out again. The things we wanted and could not buy are built in from the start:
- Arabic and English as equals: every screen in both languages, right to left where it should be.
- Access down to the record: people see what their role allows, and nothing else.
- Departments that hand work to each other: a quote becomes a project, and a project becomes purchase orders and invoices, without re-entry.
- Answers that are live: the analysis we used to rebuild every month now updates on its own.
And that spreadsheet?
It is a screen now. Customer insights in CRM & Sales read the same seven periods, the same three blocks and the same patterns, straight from the invoices, and lets a sales manager turn a slipping customer into a lead with one click. It is the first thing we built that we had been doing by hand ourselves.
What comes next
Our intention is to serve a client base with online services and develop nompany into a far greater option to compete in the market of ERPs. If you are interested in collaborations with nompany, you can reach us out on info@nompany.com to get more insights and answers.