Case study · Financial services · Payroll operations

Residential mortgage brokerage for the deals that don't fit a standard box.

Custom payroll and deal submission app

4Ever Lending ran payroll out of one shared Excel file, keyed by hand and tracked by cell color. We replaced it with a permissioned app on their own domain, taught their operations lead to change it himself, and pay runs that took hours now take minutes.

Stack

Django

React

Trigger.dev

PostgreSQL

Datadog

AWS

Claude Code

On 4Ever Lending's own hosting; their operations lead ships changes in plain English.

The challenge

Payroll ran through one shared Excel file, with every figure keyed by hand: the amounts owed to each person, reimbursements, and what the company made on each deal. Status lived in cell color, yellow for ready to pay and green for paid. It worked, but it depended entirely on careful manual entry.

As the business grew, the format started to show its limits. Nothing validated an entry, the file was both the workflow and the record, and pay statements had to come from a spreadsheet's print output.

The sheet carried pay data for contracted loan officers, so wider access was never an option.

We built a system that removes the bottleneck without widening who can see pay data.

What we shipped

A payroll and deal submission portal, login gated on a subdomain of the lender's own domain, running on their hosting and their repository. Nobody browsing the marketing site can stumble onto the submission sheet.

The handover

The handover is the part that matters. We put the client's operations lead directly into Claude Code, connected to the project's own repository. On that call he shipped his own change request, how deductions should read on a pay statement, in plain English.

That is how the app is maintained now: he describes a change, reviews the result, and ships it himself. Running payroll stopped being an afternoon of keying figures and checking cell colors, and became a review queue with a print button.

We shipped an application, but the real deliverable is that the client no longer needs us to change it.

Data and access

Access control was the point. Amounts and statements sit behind the login on 4Ever Lending's own domain and hosting, backed up daily, so pay data stays with the people who should see it.

What changed after the rollout.