Bespoke Software Development

Precinct is the software arm of QLine IT. It builds the software your business actually runs on. Not websites. The helpdesk, the stock control, the remote access, the paperwork nobody wants to type twice.

It started because we needed it ourselves. QLine IT was paying over £1,000 a month for a helpdesk that could not tell the difference between a customer and one of their forty buildings, paying again for remote access, and paying again for a tool that read supplier invoices. So we built our own, and then businesses started asking who did it.

Everything on this page is in daily use by a working UK company, not demonstrated in a sales meeting.

Four systems, three of them live today

Every one was built for a working UK company.

Helpdesk and ticketing

A full support desk replacing a well known subscription product. Email in and out on a shared inbox, triage on arrival, calls recorded and attached to the job, a customer portal and time tracking. 37,147 tickets and 63,009 time entries were moved into it in four days.

Remote support platform

A self hosted replacement for two paid remote access products. Unattended access, one off sessions for machines with no agent, and commands pushed to a whole group at once. 723 machines are enrolled across 180 client groups.

Serialised stock control

Purchase orders, goods in, and every unit tracked by its own serial number through locations, charge outs and returns, with real per unit cost and margin. A full audit trail, roles and two factor sign in.

Bills and accounts automation

Still in build. Supplier invoices arrive at one address, get read automatically and are matched against the purchase order they belong to, then pushed into the accounts package with the PDF attached. Draft first by design, nothing posts unattended.

The old helpdesk licence cost over £1,000 a month. Its replacement runs on about £26 a month. That is the shape of the argument, and it is our own invoice, not a projection.

Built by people who do security for a living

Most software companies bolt security on at the end. We came at it from the other direction. QLine IT spends its days keeping other businesses’ networks safe and being audited on it, and the same habits go into the software.

QLine IT holds Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus. The Plus is the one that matters, because an external assessor tests the systems hands on rather than taking our word from a questionnaire.

Sign in is through Microsoft, using your existing Microsoft 365 accounts and your existing multi factor authentication. When somebody leaves, disabling their account removes their access to everything, immediately.

There is no login page on the open internet. Systems sit behind authenticated tunnels rather than open ports, so there is no front door for somebody to stand at and try passwords against.

An audit trail is designed in from day one. Who did what, to which record, and when, so the day somebody asks the question it is already answered.

Your data stays in the UK, in London by default, on infrastructure in your organisation’s name. Call recordings, transcripts and anything else that would hurt if it leaked are restricted, logged and kept only as long as you actually need them.

The GDPR point nobody selling you software mentions

When your records live inside somebody else’s platform, a deletion request means asking a vendor to delete something and trusting the answer. A subject access request means exporting whatever they choose to give you. Your retention policy is whatever their product allows.

When the database is yours, you delete the row. Subject access requests come out of your own system, in full. Retention rules are yours to set. You are the data controller and you can behave like one, which is the position the regulation assumes you are in and the position an off the shelf subscription quietly takes away from you.

Nothing of yours trains anything. Your tickets, your customers and your documents are not used to improve a model, ours or anybody else’s. Read more about security and GDPR.

Where the AI sits, and where it does not

“AI powered” is on every software website in Britain and means almost nothing. Here is exactly where it sits in what we build.

Inside the software, it removes the typing. Tickets are read on arrival and come with a summary, a suggested priority and the questions that need answering first. Calls are transcribed and attached to the job. Invoices are read and matched to their purchase order.

In how it gets built, it is why you can afford this. AI assisted development moved bespoke software from too expensive to consider to cheaper than renewing. Weeks rather than quarters, and a year of licences rather than five.

And a person still decides. Nothing leaves your building on a machine’s say so. Invoices are held for a person to approve. Emails to your customers are written by your staff. Triage suggests a priority, it does not set one. See what else AI could remove from your week.

Four stages, and you can stop after the second

Nothing gets built until you have seen the whole scope and the whole price. We spend a day with your team watching how the work actually arrives, not how the process document says it does. We then give you one fixed price proposal covering what your system does, what it does not, what it costs to build and what it costs to run. One number, not a day rate. Say no and you owe us nothing further.

If you say yes, we build it and move your history into it, every record, note, attachment and logged hour. You get a working copy to poke at long before anyone depends on it. Your old system stays switched on alongside until your team stops reaching for it. Then we hand over the code, the database and the documentation.

The build is one fixed price, quoted before a line of code is written. There are no per seat fees, ever, so adding your tenth employee or your fiftieth does not move the bill. Running costs are a server and a domain. A system carrying nearly forty thousand tickets runs comfortably on a £12 a month server. Support afterwards is an optional monthly retainer, and if you cancel it your system carries on working, because it is yours.

Tell us what your current systems will not let you do

Half an hour on the phone, no slides. You will speak to the people who build it, not a salesperson working from a script. If buying off the shelf is the right answer for your business, we will say so and you will have lost thirty minutes.

Precinct is a QLine IT company, based in Leeds and working across the United Kingdom. See the full detail, including every system we have built and the numbers behind the changeover, at precinctsoftware.co.uk.