A software company · London
We build the software a business actually runs on.
Web software, mobile apps and the unglamorous internal tools that hold a company together. Some of it we build for clients. Some of it we build, run and licence ourselves — The Desk for the office, The Booth for the management company behind it, The Diary for the artist's phone, The Meter, a free app that tells an artist whether the song is ready, in tune, in time and deliverable, and fixes what it can, and Autopilot, which keeps every filing deadline for every company a founder owns, in any country.
Software that has to work on a Friday night.
We are not a design studio that also writes code. We build systems that carry real money, real contracts and real deadlines, and then we keep them running.
The system your team signs into
Records, roles, documents, money and history in one place, in a browser, with nothing to install and nothing to keep updated.
For the people not at a desk
On the road, on site, in the room. Built against the same data as everything else, so there is one version of the truth rather than two.
The page your customer sees
Quotes to approve, contracts to sign, invoices to pay, files to collect — under your name, on your domain, without asking anyone to create an account.
The spreadsheet that grew teeth
Rota, stock, jobs, approvals — replaced with something that does not break when the person who built it goes on holiday.
Getting your systems to speak
Accounting, payments, calendars, mail and website, so the same figure is not typed in by hand three times and wrong once.
Someone to write to
Isolated data stores, backups, updates, and a person who answers when something is wrong. Software is not a delivery, it is a thing that has to keep working.
Products we build, run and licence ourselves.
Each one started as a job that had to be done properly, in a working business, before it was ever sold to anyone else.
The Desk
Booking and back-office software for businesses that sell dates rather than hours. One enquiry becomes one record, and that record carries all the way through — nothing retyped, nothing lost between an inbox and a spreadsheet.
One record · five stages · nobody copies anything out of an inbox
- In daily use at Emberlight Artists, our first client
- Licensed per seat to agencies, management and production companies
- Fully white-labelled — the client's name, not ours
The Diary
A small app on an artist's phone. The team puts in what is on, what is going out and what needs a yes. The artist opens it, reads one amber line, and answers — yes, change something, or no. Nothing goes out until they have said yes, and nobody scrolls back through a group chat to find what was agreed.
- Live at Jennifer Ewbank, run by her and her team at Emberlight Artists
- Licensed per artist — their name, their branding, their own domain
- Stands on its own; does not need The Desk
The Booth
The workspace an artist management company runs itself on, and the one product here that no artist ever sees. The roster and the people you are talking to about joining it, every agreement and the points still blocking signature, the recordings that come in, the paperwork, the whole roster's diary, and what each artist has actually earned against the floor in their contract.
What needs somebody
Open points blocking a signature, agreements not yet signed, what arrived overnight, and who did what. Nothing is edited there; every line is a link into the record that owns it.
Roster, paper and media
Four stages from prospect to archived, one entry per agreement with every version and what changed, and audio, video and artwork that plays in the page.
The floor, then the commission
Income up to the annual floor carries nothing, and every pound above it is charged at its own stream's rate, by contract year rather than calendar year.
- Reads each artist's Desk for dates and fees, one direction only, and never writes back
- Four roles, so the diary is open to everybody and money and contracts are not
- Licensed per company and installed on its own, with no data shared between companies
The Meter
A free app for artists, producers and managers that answers the questions a record gets asked before it goes out: is the master right, is the singer in tune, is the drummer in time, what kind of song is it, who is it for, and what needs fixing. It installs from a link on a phone or a desktop, measures on the device, and never uploads the audio.
The technical readout
Loudness to the broadcast standard, true peak, clipping, dynamics, stereo width, tempo, key, tonal balance, and energy across the song. Each figure with a plain verdict against the streaming targets.
Genre, audience, placement
What the song is, who is likely to listen, where it fits on playlists, radio and sync, comparable artists, and an ordered fix list with a release readiness score.
The singer and the drummer
A vocal stem shows where the singer is flat or sharp and what the note needed to be. A drum or bass stem shows where the take drags or pushes, hit by hit, on a timeline.
Reference match
Your song next to a hit in the same lane: loudness, tone, energy curve and time to the hook, side by side. "Yours takes 38 seconds to get there, the reference takes 11" ends most arguments about arrangement.
The odd one out, and a running order
The whole record in one table: the track mastered too loud, the one that is too long, the key that jars, and a suggested sequence to start from.
Will the distributor bounce it?
Format, sample rate, bit depth, true peak headroom, silence, length and ISRC checked against the distributors' rules. Green means it will not come back.
Fixed on the device, free
Level, peaks, clipping, silence and width corrected and handed back as a delivery-ready WAV with the ISRC written in. Pitch and timing faults export as markers so a producer goes straight to the spot.
The Lyric and the pitch
Paste the lyric for hook clarity, repetition, sync suitability and what radio would cut. Then the Spotify playlist pitch, the sync one-liner and a bio, written in the artist's voice.
The checklist, and a human if you want one
Rights, artwork, credits, timing, the release week. And when a repair needs a producer or an engineer, the job is already diagnosed and priced per song.
Free · no account · installs from the browser on iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows · built for Emberlight Artists' onboarding and open to everyone
The Take
Pitch correction for vocals that keeps the singer's voice. Give it a vocal stem, or sing into it over your backing track, and it finds every note sung flat, sharp or drifting, moves it to pitch with its own shape intact, and shows you every change in plain words with the word from the lyric, so you can hear each one and put any of them back. Record the same part several times and it puts the best line from each take together. It runs on your own phone or Mac, never uploads the audio, and never adds a note you did not sing.
Every note, in cents
Pitch tracked a hundred times a second, grouped into notes, key detected. Each note: how far off, and whether it drifted.
Fix, keep, or ask
Slides, vibrato and blue notes are kept. Off-centre notes are fixed. Notes between two pitches, or needing a big move, are laid on an amber line for you.
The word, the curve, the A/B
Every card names the lyric word and line, draws the pitch before and after, and plays original, tuned, or both back to back.
A checked WAV and the map
The tuned file is re-measured before it is handed back, with a correction map a producer can work from.
Free beta · no account · phone and Mac · nothing uploaded
Autopilot
Every filing deadline for every company you own, in one place, whichever country it is in. Add a company once and Autopilot fills in its details from the official register, works out every deadline from that country's rules, reminds you in good time, and checks the company at its register every night. When you would rather someone else handled a filing, Grant & Graham quotes a fixed fee before any work starts.
From the official registers
Companies House, the Estonian e-Business Register, KvK, Brønnøysund and more: name, number, address, year end and officers, found by name or number.
Sixteen countries of filing rules
Accounts, tax returns, confirmation statements, VAT and payroll, counted from each company's own dates and shown fifteen months ahead.
Every night, at the register
A new officer, a changed address, a filing shown as overdue: it appears at the top of the overview the next morning.
Email, phone and calendar
30 days, 7 days and 1 day before, by default, and every deadline can follow into Apple, Google or Outlook calendars by itself.
- Built with Grant & Graham for the companies it forms and looks after, and open to any founder
- Password and an email code on every sign in; records encrypted in Europe, or on your own storage
- Laptop, tablet and phone, installable as an app, with the same records on every device
Free · works in the browser · user guide in Manuals
The next ones
There is more in the workshop, and it is being used in anger by the businesses it was written for before it carries a name on this page.
It appears here already working
We do not publish a roadmap, because a roadmap is a list of things that do not exist yet. When the next product ships, somebody's real business will already be running on it.
Businesses that run on what we built.
Four businesses, four different problems. A public website is the easy half — what matters is the admin behind it that somebody has to use every day.
Emberlight Artists
The reason The Desk exists. Their roster runs on it — every enquiry, quote, contract and invoice the company takes goes through the same screens we licence to everyone else.
- Website and booking form
- The Desk, in daily use
- Client portal and contract signing
Grant & Graham
Interim management and strategy. A website carrying case studies, press and long-form writing in more than one language, with the admin tools to keep all of it current without a developer in the loop.
- Multi-language website
- Admin tools for articles and case studies
- Enquiry routing by office and region
Hostcol
Acting for private and institutional owners from acquisition through to running the asset day to day. Their website, and the admin behind it.
- Tenancies, rent and arrears, repairs
- Compliance dates tracked, not remembered
- Owner reporting in one format, on a cadence
Jennifer Ewbank
The clearest example of what we mean by white label. We built her site across three territories, put The Desk behind her booking forms, and gave her and her team The Diary at her own address — so a release week runs from her phone rather than a group chat.
- Website across UK, Netherlands and global domains
- The Desk behind her own booking and contact forms
- The Diary at jenniferewbank.co.uk/app, for her and her team
- Nothing on either carries our name, or the software's
This was not built to be sold. It was built because we needed it. Which means when something is broken, it is broken for us too, and it gets fixed.
Andrew Collins · Emberlight ArtistsYour data sits where you say it sits.
We host in data centres around the world, so the question of where a client's records live is a decision you make rather than one you inherit. Tell us the jurisdiction and we will run it there.
Choose the country
The UK, the EU, or further afield. If your regulator, your board or your own clients require the data to stay inside a border, that is where we put it — and we will tell you exactly which facility it is in.
Kept apart
Each client has their own data store, unreachable from any web address, with nothing shared between one business and the next. Backed up, patched and monitored as part of the arrangement rather than as an extra.
Yours to take
Export everything to a spreadsheet whenever you ask, without a conversation about it first. Hosting with us should be a decision you keep making, not one you cannot reverse.
Short conversations, working software.
We would rather show you something running in three weeks than send you a specification in three weeks. You see it early, you tell us where it is wrong, and it changes while changing it is still cheap.
One conversation to understand what the business actually does.
A working slice of it in front of you before anything is signed off.
Built, hosted and looked after by the people who wrote it.
Your data exported to a spreadsheet whenever you ask for it.
No lock-in, no modules to unlock, nothing held back.
Tell us what is not working.
Whether it is a product to licence or a system to build, the first conversation is half an hour and costs nothing.