CRM Platform

A wealth management firm’s client data lived in an Access database built by a former employee. Manual processes were everywhere. Advisers spent more time on admin than on client work.

Problem

The Access database was a single point of failure. No backup. No documentation. Only one person in the firm understood how it worked. If that person left, the firm’s operational knowledge went with them.

Advisers were drowning in admin. Data entry ate into the hours they should have spent advising clients. The same information went into multiple places, manually, every time.

What They’d Tried

They evaluated Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. It was too expensive and too complex for a firm of their size. The implementation timeline alone was daunting.

They tried Zapier automations to connect their tools. The automations were fragile and broke regularly. Each break created data gaps that took hours to fix.

They hired additional admin staff. This helped with volume but did not fix the underlying problem. Data was still scattered and inconsistent.

What We Did

We reverse-engineered the Access database to understand the actual business logic encoded in its structure and queries. Years of institutional knowledge lived in that database.

We designed a normalized PostgreSQL database that preserved the business logic while making it maintainable. We built an automation layer that replaced 80% of manual data entry. We created interfaces that advisers could actually use without training.

Outcome

Manual data entry dropped by 80%. Advisers gained back meaningful hours every week. Client data was centralized, backed up, and accessible from anywhere. The firm scaled without adding headcount because the system handled the administrative load.

The Database-First Lesson

The Access database contained years of institutional knowledge in its structure and queries. We did not throw it away. We extracted the business logic, modeled it properly in a modern database, and built something that could grow with the firm. The data model was the asset. The Access interface was just the shell.