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Project Specifications Building

This is the phase that we will:

  • build you a mockup
  • create a proposal including specifications

If an architect doesn’t understand your requirement and you end up with one less bathroom that is not a good situation. By now we should have a good idea of what you want and we’ll try to do our best to visualize it. We do a great amount of handholding and we’ll talk every detail through with you. You will need to be available to talk to us during this phase, because we are not mind-readers (as much as you’d like us to be). The time it takes to build your specifications greatly depends on how many things you want to track in your solution.

A mockup is a visual representation of what your solution will look like. We use a great online mockup software by Balsamiq, and it is the best possible tool out there to create the screens you will be seeing in your solution. We will not mock every possible layout or report up, because that could take weeks/months, but we will have every major one represented with the workflow. You will have access to the mockup online and can comment and make recommendations or corrections. Once we we deem it finished, we will ask you kindly to sign off on it then we’ll move onto creating a proposal. A lot of times to save time we’ll work on the proposal simultaneously.

While we charge by the hour for maintenance or project modifications on existing work done by other developers, when we create a project for you from scratch we will give you a fixed bid. That means that we will estimate how many hours the project will take and we will give you a number that we will stick to. A lot of FileMaker developers will not charge for a proposal, give you a low and high hours and generally go way over the high hours. Our work ethic dictates that we’ll quote you properly and then we’ll stick to it. If we go over the budgeted hours, we will eat the overhead. If we come out under, you can use the remaining hours for maintenance or put it toward phase II.

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