The thing you do every Monday in a spreadsheet could be software by the end of the month.

Not built by an agency for £40,000. Built by your own people, in three days spread over three weeks, with me sitting next to them making sure it actually works.

Three days of your people's time, six days of mine, from £4,000 + VAT. Remote, or on site.

You know exactly which process I mean

Every business has one. Someone exports two reports and reconciles them by hand. Someone re-keys the same information into a second system. Someone maintains a spreadsheet that four people depend on and one person understands.

It costs a couple of days a month, it's been like that for years, and it has never once been worth £40,000 and a four-month project to fix. So it stays.

That maths has recently changed, and most businesses haven't noticed yet.

What's actually different now

The AI tools that write software have got good enough that a capable, non-technical person, the one who already builds your complicated spreadsheets, can describe what they want in plain English and get working software back.

That is a genuinely new thing and I'm not going to oversell it. Here's the honest version:

It works. People with no programming background are building real, useful internal tools with these things, today.

And it goes wrong in ways you can't see. The software it writes looks finished when it isn't. It will confidently do the wrong thing to your data. It will build something that works on Tuesday's numbers and quietly breaks on Wednesday's. If nobody experienced is looking, you find out at the worst possible moment.

That gap, between "anyone can now build this" and "somebody needs to check it", is the whole reason this page exists.

What this actually is

I help you and your team build the tool you want, using AI. I provide support and guidance, but it's your team doing it and your team gaining the experience.

You pick one process. We spend three days on it, spread over three weeks. Your own person does the building. I sit with them, show them how, check what comes out, and tell you honestly whether it's safe to rely on.

At the end you have the tool running, and you have someone in the building who has done it once with an experienced person watching, and can do the next one.

I call it a cobuild: your person builds it, I'm there while they do.

This is slower and more costly than me just building it for you

I'd rather you heard that from me now.

If you can hand me a clean spec, I'll build it faster and it'll be better. For one tool, that's often the right call, and if it's the right call for you I'll tell you on the phone rather than take your money.

The hard part is usually writing the spec. The process you want as software tends to live in one person's head, built up over years: which customers get the exception and why, what to do when the numbers don't reconcile, the four things that are never written on the form but always matter. Getting that out of them and into a document I can build from is slow, lossy, and sometimes it simply doesn't survive the trip. You end up paying me to misunderstand you accurately.

A cobuild skips the trip. The person who already holds it builds the thing, so what they know goes into the software directly rather than through me.

This is for the other situation: you have a list. Not one process, but four or five, and more you haven't thought of yet. Paying someone to build them one at a time means you're still paying someone in three years. Paying once so your own people can build them means you're not.

You're buying the second one and the fifth. The first is just where we do it.

This is for you if

You have a specific process in mind and you could tell me roughly how many hours a month it eats.
You have someone who'd actually enjoy this. Usually the person who builds the complicated spreadsheets, or writes the fiddly formulas, or has already been quietly experimenting with ChatGPT. This matters more than anything else on this page. Without a willing person, don't do it.
You've got more than one process like this, and you know it.
You can spend £4,000 without it going to a board.

This is not for you if

You just want the tool. Then buy the tool, or pay someone to build it. Cheaper and better for a one-off, and I'll say so.
Nobody in the building wants to do it. This does not work as something assigned to a reluctant person. It genuinely doesn't.
You already employ developers. Then this isn't your page. try this one instead.
You're hoping this replaces staff. It doesn't, and I wouldn't sell it to you on that basis. It makes the people you have able to do more.
You need it to cost under £2,000. I understand why, and it can't. I'd rather say that here than waste your time on a call.

What it looks like

First, a 30-minute call, free. You describe the process. I tell you whether it's a good candidate, whether you've got the right person, and whether you'd be better off just buying something off the shelf. Sometimes the answer is "there's already software for that" and I'll tell you.

Before week 1, two days of mine. I scope the process properly, set up an environment that works for someone who has never had one, and do the preparation so that day one is spent building rather than installing.

Week 1, one day. We set your person up properly and start on the real thing, not a tutorial. Your actual process. By the end of the day something works.

Week 2, one day. They've had a week on it. We go through what's been built, fix what's fragile, and put the checks in place so you can tell when it's wrong.

Week 3, one day. Finish it, get it running where it needs to run, and write down how to look after it. I'll give you an honest note on what it's safe to do next without me, and what isn't.

Where it ends up running

Building it, deploying it and getting it hosted are all part of the job. You finish with the tool running somewhere it can keep running, and no ongoing requirement for me. That's the whole point. If you still need me afterwards, it hasn't worked.

Where it runs depends on you, and it's something we settle on the call rather than something I can put on a page. Your own servers. A cloud account in your name. A dedicated machine. The PC in the corner of the office, if that's the right answer, and sometimes it is. A container, or a compiled program somebody double-clicks. There's no one size that fits everybody, and committing to the wrong one early is how these things end up costing money forever.

From £4,000 + VAT. That is six days of my time. Two days preparing before we start, three days building alongside your person, and a day of support spread across the three weeks. Three of those days are in your diary. The rest are in mine.

Remote by video is the default and it works fine. On site if you'd rather. I'm in West Yorkshire. Travel and accommodation costs are extra, and would be agreed up front.

Who you'd be working with

I'm Joseph Edmonds. I've built software for businesses for about 25 years, and I run this through LTS Commerce Ltd in Shipley.

I've built the business processes behind tens of millions in annual turnover, and led developer teams and agencies to do it. The systems a whole company runs on, kept working while the company grew around them.
The first proper thing I ever built was exactly this. I wasn't a programmer. I was running the operations at a company where the manual processes were killing us at Christmas, we couldn't find anyone to build the system, and the contractor we did find disappeared. So I learned to do it myself and built it. The next Christmas was a completely different business. That is the same shape as what I'm offering you, minus twenty years of it being hard.
I wrote a book on programming for a technical publisher, by hand, before AI wrote anything.
I've run a software company with about fifteen people, so I know what it costs to have things built for you.
I've spent two years pioneering AI-assisted development: production work every day on a live system a real business depends on. When it went wrong, and early on it went badly wrong, I built the safety tooling the practice needed, because it did not exist. That tooling is public and other people use it.

I'll tell you straight if something's a bad idea, or if what you've got isn't working. Some people find that annoying. It's usually why I was worth the money.

The obvious questions

"Can our person really do this?"

Some people can and some can't, and it's not about being clever. It's about being the sort of person who reads the message on the screen instead of giving up. You almost certainly know who that is. If you're not sure, we'll find out on the first day and you'll have spent one day, not three.

"Can't we just try it ourselves for free?"

Yes, and honestly you should try. The tools are cheap or free. What you'll struggle with on your own is knowing whether what you've built is safe to trust with real data, which is the bit that costs money when it's wrong.

"What if it doesn't work?"

Then after day one you'll know, and you can stop. I'd rather that than take three days' money for something that was never going to fly.

"Is this going to leave us with something nobody can fix?"

It's a real risk and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It's most of what the three days is actually for: building it so it's simple, checkable, and documented enough that someone else can pick it up.

"What about our data?"

NDA before anything. And I'll tell you plainly which of these tools sends what to whom, including the bits where the vendors' answers are vague.

Tell me about the process

I'm exploring whether there's real demand for this before I build anything around it. There's no start date and nothing is scheduled.

Tell me about the thing you do by hand and I'll reply personally. Me, not an automation. If I think you'd be better off buying software that already exists, I'll say so and tell you what to look at.

Registering isn't a commitment, and I'm not asking for money at this stage.

How I handle your data. I use what you send to reply to you and to talk about the work. My basis is your consent, given by ticking the box; you can withdraw it any time by replying to any email. It is stored in a private Google spreadsheet only I can open, and Google process it on my behalf and nobody else sees it. No cookies, no analytics, no tracking of any kind on this page. Ask me to delete it and I will. The full detail is here, including how long I keep it and how to complain.

Questions, or you would rather just talk to a human? Email me at [email protected]. I answer everything myself.