People often delay contacting a developer because they think they need a detailed specification first. You do not. A good team will write the specification with you. What helps most is being clear on a handful of plain questions.
1. What is going wrong today?
Describe the problem in the words your staff would use. “Customers call to ask if a room is free and we miss half of them” is far more useful than “we need a booking engine”.
2. Who will use it?
Customers on their phones, staff at a front desk, managers on a laptop once a week? Each group needs a different design, and some may not need anything new at all.
3. What does success look like?
Pick one or two things you could measure: fewer missed bookings, faster month-end close, less stock written off. This keeps everyone honest about what the system is for.
4. What already exists?
List the tools, spreadsheets and accounts you rely on now, even the messy ones. A lot of the cost of a project sits in connecting to these, and some of them can be kept.
5. What is your budget range and deadline?
A range is enough. It tells us whether to propose a lean first version or something fuller, and it saves you from proposals you could never approve.
Then send it over
If you can answer those five, you are ready. Our project brief form walks through them in about three minutes, and we reply within one working day with questions or a first outline.
