Describe what you need.

Keep the brief either way.

One line. It sets the language the rest of the brief is written in.

Everything that applies. Most businesses use several at once, and that is usually the problem.

• Spreadsheets
• WhatsApp or group chat
• Email threads
• Paper, or a whiteboard
• People who remember thingsOne person knows how it works and everyone asks them.
• A tool we have outgrownIt works, but you are working around it more than with it.

The honest answers here are what the recommendation is built from. Skip anything that is not really a problem.

• Nobody can tell what state something is in
• Things get forgotten unless somebody chases
• The same information is typed in more than once
• Customers or staff ring up to ask where things are
• Getting a straight answer out of the data takes hours
• Mistakes get through that should have been caught
• We cannot prove what happened, or who did it
• It worked at half the size and does not now

• Under five
• Five to twenty
• Twenty to a hundred
• More than a hundred

People outside the business change the shape of the build more than any other answer here.

• Our own staff
• Managers, who see more than staff do
• CustomersThey see their own information and nobody else's.
• Contractors or subcontractors
• People working away from a deskOn site, in a van, in a warehouse.

The nouns. Roughly how many kinds of thing the system has to hold.

• Jobs, projects or cases
• Customers, clients or members
• Staff, shifts or availability
• Stock, assets or equipment
• Quotes, invoices or payments
• Documents, photos or certificates

Only the things that matter. An honest short list produces a better first slice than a complete wish list.

• Hold the records properly, in one place
• Move things through stages, with rules about who can do what
• Schedule work, people or appointments
• Produce documents — quotes, certificates, invoices
• Take photos and file uploads
• Tell people when something needs them
• Get sign-off before something proceeds
• Show what is going on, at a glance
• Take or reconcile payments
• Get existing data in, and get data back out

• Accounting — Xero, Sage, QuickBooks
• A CRM
• Payments — Stripe, GoCardless
• Calendars — Google, Outlook
• E-signature
• A regulator or government portal
• An older system nobody wants to touchOn-premise, no documented way in.

Each one applies across the whole build rather than adding a feature to it, which is why they are asked separately.

• The data is regulated or genuinely sensitiveHealth, financial, children, or anything with a retention obligation.
• It has to work without a signal
• People need to see each other's changes immediately
• Several businesses or branches, each seeing only their own
• Years of existing data has to come across