One week in a small business, and the system that survived it.

Somebody you met in June sends an email.

You already have her. Not because you remembered to add her, but because you photographed her business card on your phone at an industry evening in June and titleblock filed the company and the person as a linked pair, warned you that you already had her firm under a slightly different spelling, and cropped the logo off the card while it was at it.

One contacts database. Clients, consultants and your own team in it, people attached to the companies they work for, and every project a contact has ever touched listed on their page.

You price it the way you actually price it.

By stage, with your own stage names, not a fixed template somebody else decided was the shape of your job. Each stage carries its agreed value. You write the description in normal language, list what the fee does not cover, and it prints as a fee proposal on your letterhead with the schedule laid out and VAT stated correctly for the date you are sending it.

Stage descriptions can run to a paragraph, because yours do. The document paginates around them instead of overprinting the footer.

Example figures. The email draft opens in your own mail client with the PDF already on it, so you can still say something human before you send it.

She says yes. That is one click, not a re-entry job.

The accepted proposal becomes a project, carrying its stages across as the fee schedule. You give it your own reference (yours, the one that appears on everything else you produce) and from then on every invoice numbers itself against it.

When the client later asks for something nobody priced, that is a variation quote against the same project. Accepted and applied, its lines append as new stages and the agreed fee grows. Work removed goes the same way, as negative lines. The invoice sequence simply carries on.

You are out at a client's premises, and somebody hands you a card.

The Android app is not a cut-down companion with three screens. It is the whole system, over the same live data: the same projects, the same invoices, the same contacts you left open on the desk. What it adds is the two things only a phone has.

The camera. Photograph the card. It reads the name, the job title, the company, the email, the phone and the website, and clips the logo off the card to use as the company's picture. Then it checks what you already have and tells you before it saves anything, so a practice you know under a slightly different spelling comes back as a warning, not a second copy. You get a confirmation screen you can edit. Accept it and there is a company and a person, filed and linked, before you are back in the car. It costs about two pence a card.

The share sheet. Every document the system makes (the invoice PDF, the fee proposal, the email draft with the PDF already attached, a CSV, an Excel file) is handed to Android properly, so it goes straight into your mail or your files from where you are standing.

Example card. The image is never kept, only what you confirm.

Specialists, expenses, and where the week really went.

The specialist you bring in (an associate, a subcontractor, whoever the job needs) is appointed to the project with a discipline and a fee, and marked as paid by you or paid direct by the client, because those are two completely different facts and only one of them lands in your books. The ones you pay become expenses you can recharge as disbursements.

Hours go on a Monday-to-Sunday grid, by project and stage, with the rows for the time that is not on any project and still has to be paid for. Cost rates freeze at the moment of entry, so next year's raise never quietly rewrites what this job cost. Only directors see anyone else's hours, or any cost at all.

"Can we do twenty per cent up front?"

Yes, and this is where most systems start lying to you. titleblock bills a slice of a stage, a percentage or an amount, and tracks what remains against it, so the deposit now and the balance in November land exactly on the agreed figure with no stranded pennies. Try to bill more than a stage is worth and it refuses; that is what a variation is for.

Raising an invoice sweeps up the completed stages and the billable expenses nobody has invoiced yet, so nothing gets forgotten and nothing gets billed twice. The number is allocated at the moment you issue it, in your own format. Drafts stay editable. Issued invoices stop dead; corrections are credit notes, with their own numbering.

Money arrives under a name you have never heard of.

It always does. The transfer carries a holding company you have never heard of, or a payroll bureau, or somebody's father. titleblock records the payer name exactly as it appears on the statement alongside the reference, so six months later you can still prove which payment was which. Part payments are normal. Balances and status are worked out from the payments every time they are shown, never stored, so they cannot drift away from the truth.

And the dashboard has already moved: agreed against invoiced against paid on every live project, what is overdue, twelve months of cash in and out, the pipeline with a win rate, and the fee you have agreed but not yet billed, which is usually the number that matters most and the one nobody has.

Came out

81pShort, across a whole book of work

Put through it

93Back-dated invoices

In production

Aug2026, and running daily since

Before titleblock was offered to anybody else, a whole book of historic work went into it (thirty-six projects, ninety-three invoices, a hundred and eight payments) and the ledger came out 81 pence short. The 81 pence was a genuine transposition: 7,797.09 received against 7,797.90 invoiced, unnoticed for a year. Figures illustrative; the exercise is not.

And then the return is due.

If you are VAT registered, the return has to be filed under Making Tax Digital, which means the chain from your records to HMRC has to be joined by digital links. Reading a figure off a screen and typing it into a spreadsheet is explicitly not one of those. This is the part being built now.

The figures. The nine box values as a file your bridging software reads and submits, with a second file listing every transaction behind them. Driven by payments rather than invoices, because cash accounting follows the money and not the paperwork. Part payments split between net and VAT, and the last payment against an invoice takes the residue, so an invoice's whole life reconciles to its own figures exactly.

The purchases. Your bank export beside your supplier invoices, matched line by line, with each supplier's VAT treatment decided once and remembered. Reverse charge on overseas services. Exempt insurance. Blocked input VAT on entertainment and margin-scheme goods. An unpaid invoice carries forward instead of quietly inflating the return, because that is what cash accounting means.

Working software is due in early November, so it can be dry-run against a real return before anyone has to depend on it. A VAT return falls due one calendar month and seven days after the period it covers, the only date on this page set by somebody other than you.

What it costs, put as honestly as we can put it.

titleblock is a subscription service, sold to other businesses. There is nothing to install and no server for you to run: your business gets its own workspace, sealed off from every other one, with your logo on the documents, your invoice numbering and your VAT details.

It is in pilot now, with a deliberately small number of businesses, and for them it runs at cost. Not free. At cost. We would rather the first people on it were people who genuinely need it than people who took it because it was free and never opened it again.

The price afterwards is not set, and there is no number on this page because inventing one would be the first dishonest thing on it. The shape of it we can tell you: below what the established products charge. That is the point of the exercise, not an introductory offer: the whole reason this exists is that they were the wrong size and the wrong money for a business like ours. Pilot businesses will see the price before anybody else, and before they have to decide anything.