Not every problem should be solved with more custom software. For eight years I built and ran a custom budgeting and financial-reporting platform because no supported product did the job. When a commercial platform — Vantaca — matured to where it could, the right engineering decision was to retire my own system and move the process onto the supported platform, and I led that migration as its technical lead.
// case study
Migrating budgeting onto Vantaca
Retiring a custom system I'd run for years in favor of a team-supported platform — and owning the clean handoff.
// the judgment
The instinct that makes someone a good builder — "I can build that" — is not always the instinct that serves the business. Build vs. buy is a judgment call, and being honest about it is a senior signal: knowing when your own system, however much you like maintaining it, should be handed to a platform a whole team supports. Choosing to retire working software you wrote is harder than choosing to write more of it — and usually more valuable.
// the handoff
A clean handoff, not a code dump.
Migrating a live financial process is mostly design and coordination, not code. Working with the business owner and a cross-functional team, I co-designed a 20-step approval workflow that mapped the existing budgeting process onto the platform's model — preserving the controls and approvals people relied on. The goal throughout was a handoff the team could own without me: the process documented, the workflow designed on the supported platform, and the custom system retired on purpose rather than left to rot.
// beyond budgeting
The same pattern showed up again: I later led the transition of the work-order function onto Salesforce, while the bid and purchase-order module I'd built stayed in production where it still fit. Build where it's warranted; buy and hand off where the platform has caught up. That's the "handed it off" mode of how I deliver — the counterpart to building it in the first place.
Production work at Ghertner & Company, described at a high level — no proprietary detail, code, or data.