Case study · Auditwise
A compliance platform built to serve many organizations from one codebase.
A multi-tenant SaaS product for running inspections, tracking corrective actions, and proving compliance across many sites, taken from MVP to a platform ready for enterprise customers.
- Sector
- Food safety & multi-site operations
- Services
- Scope
- MVP to scale-up
- Core stack
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL
This case study shows how we would approach a representative project of this kind. It is not a record of a specific client engagement: names, interfaces, and plans are examples, and outcomes are described as what would be measured rather than as results.
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§ 01The situation
Where things stand.
A founding team with deep food-safety expertise wants to turn the inspection method they use as consultants into a subscription product for restaurant groups, caterers, and franchise networks.
Their first customers range from a single kitchen to groups with hundreds of locations. The product has to be simple enough for a site manager on a tablet, and robust enough to pass an enterprise customer's security review.
What makes it hard
Tenancy from day one
Customer data must be strictly separated, while the team still supports customers and ships changes to everyone at once.
Organizations within organizations
A franchise network has regions, sites, and franchisees, each with different permissions and reporting needs.
Inspections without signal
Kitchens and cellars have poor connectivity, and an inspection cannot be lost because the connection dropped.
Enterprise readiness
Larger customers ask for single sign-on, audit logs, and clear answers on security before they sign.
§ 02The solution
What we would build.
Each part answers one of the problems above, and each can be delivered and tested on its own.
- Tenant-aware core
- One shared application with tenant isolation enforced in the database, so a missing filter in a single query cannot expose another customer's data.
- Hierarchy & roles
- Organizations, regions, and sites modeled as a tree, with role-based permissions inherited down each branch.
- Inspection builder
- Templates with scoring, required photos, and conditional questions, completed offline and synchronized when the connection returns.
- Corrective actions
- Failed items become assigned actions with deadlines, reminders, and escalation, so issues are closed rather than just recorded.
- Plans & billing
- Per-site subscription plans, trials, and invoicing through a billing provider, with plan limits enforced in the product.
- Enterprise controls
- SAML single sign-on, an audit log of every change, data export, and an internal admin console for the team.
§ 03Architecture
How the pieces fit.
A layered view of the proposed system. The highlighted component carries the logic the rest of the system depends on, so it is designed and tested first.
01 Interfaces
- Tenant workspace
- Offline inspection app
- Admin console
02 Application
- Tenants & identity
- Inspections & templates
- Actions & reminders
- Reporting
03 Integration
- Billing provider
- SSO (SAML, OIDC)
- Email delivery
- Public API & webhooks
04 Platform
- PostgreSQL with row-level security
- Job queue
- AWS
- Terraform
§ 04Delivery plan
Delivered in stages you can review.
Each stage ends with something working that you can evaluate before committing to the next.
Stage 01
12 weeks
MVP
Inspections, corrective actions, and basic reporting for the first design-partner customers.
Stage 02
8 weeks
Commercial launch
Self-service sign-up, plans and billing, onboarding, and the organization hierarchy.
Stage 03
8 weeks
Enterprise readiness
Single sign-on, audit log, data export, and documented security controls.
Stage 04
Ongoing
Scale
Performance, analytics, integrations, and a public API.
§ 05Outcomes
What you receive, and how success is measured.
Targets for each measure are agreed during discovery, using your current figures as the baseline, and reported on throughout delivery.
Deliverables
- Multi-tenant SaaS platform and offline inspection app
- Plans, billing, and trial flows
- Single sign-on and audit logging
- Security and architecture documentation for customer reviews
- Infrastructure as code for staging and production
Measured by
- Time from sign-up to first completed inspection
- Corrective actions closed before their deadline
- Trial-to-paid conversion
- Effort to onboard a new enterprise tenant
§ 06Start a project
Planning something similar?
Describe where things stand today and what needs to change. We will reply with questions and an initial view of scope and approach.
- 01
Share the context
A short description of the project, your goals, and any constraints you already know about.
- 02
We review it
We read it carefully and reply with questions or an initial perspective on the problem.
- 03
A first conversation
A call to explore scope, approach, and whether we are the right fit for the work.