Thoughts on web development, digital strategy, Laravel, and building software for agencies.
Freelance recruiters decide your strike rates, your validation results and a large share of your margin, yet most agencies manage them through email, spreadsheets and goodwill. This guide covers employment status and IR35, what the Fair Work Agency means since April 2026, how to pay recruiters, what IQCS requires, and how to score recruiter quality fairly.
Read article →Every recruit you will ever deliver starts in your participant database, yet most agencies run it across a CRM, recruiter spreadsheets and inboxes. This guide covers the UK GDPR and MRS rules that apply, what changed under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, how to enforce repeat participation and fraud checks, and what a well-run database looks like.
Read article →Most fieldwork margin is won or lost before the first call is made. This guide shows how incidence, strike rates, labour floors, validation and over-recruitment really drive the cost of a job, with a worked recruitment model, and how to turn your own job history into quotes you can trust.
Read article →Incentives are often the biggest pass-through cost on a fieldwork job and the least controlled. This guide covers the UK rules that shape how you pay participants, the VAT question most agencies never ask, where incentive margin leaks, and what a proper incentive workflow looks like from promise to rebill.
Read article →Accelo and Scoro are excellent at running agencies that sell time. Fieldwork and research agencies sell recruits, completes and sessions, with incentives, quotas and freelance networks to manage. This guide covers how to choose between configuring a PSA platform, extending one, or building an operations platform around the way your agency actually works.
Read article →Everyone is flat out, nobody has had a quiet week since February, and the margin is still down. Utilisation is the least glamorous number in an insight agency and the one that quietly decides whether you make money.
Read article →If your team is duct-taping spreadsheets, plugins, and manual workarounds together, you are not alone. Here is when bespoke Laravel development starts to make commercial sense for Leeds businesses and when it does not.
Read article →Purpose-built resource planning is not for everyone. If you are trying to reach the agencies that will get value from it or deciding whether that is you - the same signals apply.
Read article →Spreadsheets start as a convenience and end up as a liability. Here's a practical, modular approach to replacing them in a research agency environment without overcomplicating your workflow.
Read article →Most insight consultancies know their resource planning is held together with Excel and good intentions. The harder question is: what do you replace it with?
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