Hey all,
Sharing a recent build for two reasons. First, it shows Adalo running a real business operation, not a side tool. Second, I planned the whole thing sitting inside the client’s workshop, and that changed what I built.
The client: an auto repair workshop. Multiple bays, techs, a service counter, a steady flow of customers and vehicles.
Before: everything manual or in Excel. A sheet for parts, a separate one for sales, another for jobs. None of them connected, so nothing reconciled without someone doing it by hand. And all of them were maintained by one person, the owner.
What that meant in practice: when a tech needed stock information, he didn’t check a file. He asked the owner. Same for what a customer had been quoted. The owner wasn’t administering the system, he was the system, and the spreadsheets were his notes.
That’s the part I only understood by being there. I don’t scope this kind of work from a call. I brought my laptop into the workshop and built on their floor while cars were on the lifts, which is how I work on every project I take.
What’s in the build:
- Customer and vehicle records as the centre of the app, not a lookup table
- Full service history per vehicle with costs, so anyone at the counter can answer questions without asking the owner
- Parts and job status visible to the techs
- Registration, VIN, mileage, next service date on the vehicle record
- An AI service desk that takes the customer’s car and symptom, quotes, checks parts and offers a slot
A lot of the work I take on now is this category: management systems and CRMs for operating businesses, mainly US, UK and Australia. This is a full business operation running on Adalo. Parts, sales, jobs, customers, vehicles, service history, all in one system the counter and the techs use daily. The platform was never the limiting factor. The constraint is whether the data model matches how the business actually runs, which is exactly what the site visit is for.
Two things I’d tell to anyone building operational systems here:
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Ask to see the real files, not a description of them. The columns they invented and the tab nobody has updated since March are the most honest spec document you’ll ever get, and it already exists.
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Notice who gets asked things. If every question in the building routes to one person, that’s your actual project. Just putting their spreadsheets on a screen would have kept the exact same problem, only prettier.
Happy to go into the data model if anyone’s building something similar. And curious whether others here scope operational builds on site, and what you’ve caught that way.
If you’re running a business on spreadsheets and wondering whether Adalo can carry the whole operation, it can. Ask me here, or reach out directly.
Ali Bazzi, founder of Webnux
Adalo Expert profile: https://www.adalo.com/experts/ali-bazzi
webnux.org | info@webnux.org
