Most engineering consultancies run on a pile of tools that were never meant to meet: timesheets in one subscription, projects in a second, leave in a spreadsheet, invoices in the accounting package, car keys on a hook by the door, and approvals in somebody's inbox. Every one of them charges per user per month, none of them talk to each other, and the gaps between them are filled by an office manager re-typing the same numbers.
We specialise in replacing that stack with one web app built around how your practice actually operates. Staff log hours against real project phases, that time flows straight into progress claims and payroll, leave and approvals follow your delegation rules, and the directors get utilisation and profitability by project without waiting until month end. You pay to build it once, you own the code and the data, and adding your twentieth or fiftieth engineer does not increase the licence bill — because there is no licence.
A custom engineering consultancy web app replaces multiple separate subscriptions with a single system covering timesheets, project and budget tracking, client and tender records, invoicing and progress claims, leave requests, multi-level approvals, expense claims, document registers, plant and pool-vehicle bookings, and compliance records such as licence and insurance expiry. Designie, a Sydney studio led by a project manager and engineer working in the engineering consultancy industry, builds these as bespoke platforms — the firm owns the code, the data and the hosting, with no per-user licence fees.
Before / After
Your platform
The Interface
Three screens from a practice platform of this kind: what a principal sees on Monday morning, what an engineer fills in on Friday afternoon, and what a project manager opens before a client call. Your build is designed around your own workflow and branding — these show the shape of it.
Utilisation, unbilled WIP, debtors, invoiced month-to-date and live pipeline on one screen, with the approvals inbox, compliance watchlist and fleet bookings beside them. These are the numbers most directors currently wait until month end to see.
Hours logged against project and phase, with approved leave, expense claims, travel requests and equipment bookings on the same screen. How fast this screen is decides whether staff keep timesheets current — which is why everything downstream depends on it.
Fee, spend, percentage complete, unbilled WIP and forecast margin, then budget versus actual for every phase including subconsultants. Open RFIs and variations sit next to the deliverables register with revision and issue status.
Illustrative interface concepts with sample data. Not a live client system, and the firms, projects and figures shown are fictional.
Per-seat subscriptions punish you for growing. A platform you own costs what it costs to build, then serves your whole team — including casuals, graduates and subconsultants — at no extra licence cost.
A job number is entered once and follows the work all the way through: timesheet, budget, variation, invoice and report. No exports, no re-keying, no month-end reconciliation between systems that disagree.
Phases and disciplines, fee budgets, checking and verification sign-off, site visits, RFIs and revision-controlled drawings. Generic business software has no concept of any of it.
Utilisation, write-offs, budget burn and profitability by project, updated as timesheets are entered — not assembled in a spreadsheet three weeks after the month closes.
The Menu
Every practice is different, so nothing here is compulsory — this is the menu we work from during discovery. Most firms start with the two or three modules causing the most pain, then extend once the platform is live and staff trust it.
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Not every module suits every practice. Tell us how your firm runs and we'll tell you which ones are worth building first.
Wisam Tozah
Founder, Designie — project manager and engineer in engineering consultancy
Who Builds It
Designie is run by Wisam Tozah — a project manager and engineer working in the engineering consultancy industry. The platform comes from having filled in the timesheets, chased the variation that never got billed and waited on an approval sitting in somebody’s inbox. You won’t spend the first six weeks explaining what a fee phase is.
Add up what a mid-sized consultancy pays per user per month across a timesheet tool, a project tool, an HR and leave platform, an expense app, a fleet booking system and a document manager. Then add the invisible cost: the admin hours spent moving data between them, the month-end reconciliation, the reports that have to be rebuilt in Excel because no single system holds the whole picture, and the licences you keep paying for staff who left. A platform you own removes the recurring per-seat bill and the manual glue at the same time — and the payback usually shows up in admin hours before it shows up in the subscription line.
Off-the-shelf business software models a company as staff, tasks and invoices. An engineering consultancy is not that shape. Work is organised by job number, phase and discipline. Fees are budgeted per phase and burned by grade. Deliverables need a designer, a checker and an approver before they leave the building. Site visits need a vehicle, a licence check and an induction record. Variations have to be captured the day they happen or they never get billed. We build the system around those realities rather than asking your engineers to bend their workflow into somebody else’s data model.
The fastest way to fail at this is to try to replace everything at once. We start with a discovery workshop that maps your current tools, spreadsheets and workarounds, then identify the module causing the most pain — usually timesheets, because everything downstream depends on it. That goes live first, with your real data in it, while the rest of the stack keeps running. Each subsequent module lands on a platform your staff already use and trust, so adoption is incremental rather than a single disruptive switchover.
The platform is deployed to hosting in your firm’s name, under your accounts. You get the source code and the database. If you want another developer to extend it in three years, they can. If you want to bring it in-house, you can. This matters more in engineering than in most industries: your project records, calculations and correspondence carry a professional liability tail measured in years or decades, and none of that should live somewhere you can lose access to because a vendor changed its pricing, was acquired, or shut down.
Most Australian engineering consultancies run some combination of an off-the-shelf practice management product, a separate timesheet or project tool, an accounting package such as Xero or MYOB, an HR or leave platform, and a set of spreadsheets covering whatever the other systems do not. Larger firms buy an integrated practice management suite; smaller ones assemble a stack of per-user subscriptions. The third option is a custom web app built for the one firm, which covers the same ground without per-seat licensing and without the gaps between separate systems.
The first module — usually timesheets — is typically live in weeks rather than months, because it is scoped deliberately narrow and runs alongside your existing tools. A full platform covering projects, invoicing, leave, approvals and fleet is built out in stages after that, at a pace set by how quickly your team adopts each release. We scope each stage individually so you are never committing to an open-ended build.
No. It runs in the browser on hosting we set up in your firm’s name, with automated backups and monitoring. Day-to-day configuration — charge-out rates, roles, leave rules, approval chains, new project types — is designed to be changed by your admin or office manager without touching code. We handle the technical maintenance under a support arrangement, and because you own the code you are free to move that to anyone else.
It is a custom web app — sometimes called a practice management platform or an internal business system. It runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install and your team reaches it from the office, home or site. It is deliberately not SaaS: software as a service means renting a shared product from a vendor on a per-user subscription, which is the arrangement this replaces. Here the platform is built for your firm alone, and you own it the way you would own any other business asset.
It is a build cost up front against a recurring per-user cost forever. The maths depends on your headcount and how many tools you are paying for — a three-person practice is usually better off with subscriptions, and a firm of twenty-plus across several systems usually is not. Add the admin hours currently spent moving data between systems and the crossover point comes sooner than most directors expect. We will do that calculation honestly with you in discovery, including telling you if you are better off staying where you are.
No, and we would advise against it. We usually start with the single module causing the most pain — most often timesheets, since invoicing, utilisation and payroll all depend on it — get it live with real data, then extend. Your existing tools keep running until each replacement is proven.
Yes. Both have well-supported APIs, so approved invoices, purchase orders and payroll data can flow through without re-keying. We can also sync with Microsoft 365 for single sign-on and calendar integration, and link documents held in SharePoint or OneDrive rather than duplicating them.
Migration is part of the project. We bring across projects, clients, staff records and historical timesheet and invoice data so reporting still works across the changeover. Where data lives in spreadsheets, we clean and import it — which usually surfaces a few inconsistencies worth knowing about anyway.
That depends almost entirely on whether entering a timesheet takes twenty seconds or three minutes, so it is where we spend design effort. Fast entry with recent projects pre-filled, sensible defaults, mobile access for site work and automatic reminders. We also run training per role rather than one generic session, because a director and a graduate need different things from the system.
Yes. The underlying pattern — job numbers, phases, fee budgets, timesheets, checking workflows, compliance records — holds across civil, structural, geotechnical, electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, environmental and surveying practices. The terminology, approval rules and deliverable types get configured to your discipline during discovery.
You own the code, the data and the hosting, so you are never blocked. Configuration such as rates, roles, leave rules and approval chains is designed to be changed by your admin staff without a developer. Larger additions can be scoped as new modules — by us, or by any developer you choose.
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