One back office, a dozen lines of business

The client

A company-formation agent, and More Input's first client.

The challenge

Forming a company used to mean paper forms, a printer and a trip to the post office. Our client wanted to sell new companies online, quickly and in volume. Then, as the market changed, it kept adding the services its customers needed next: a registered office, VAT registration, a domain name, an accountant. Each new line of business had to be ordered, paid for, fulfilled, invoiced and reported on, and staff needed one place to do all of it.

What we built

One back office that grew with the business for 25 years, and, from the early 2000s, the website in front of it:

• Online ordering with an instant company-name check, package comparison and secure card payment
• Filing directly with Companies House: first by printing the official forms, then electronically, with results coming back automatically
• A stock of ready-made companies, with a compliance check before any sale
• Registered office and service addresses, with a log of every item of post received
• VAT, Corporation Tax and charity registration, name changes, company searches and company-secretarial work
• Domain names sold alongside new companies, through a domain registrar's reseller service: registration, transfers, renewals and reminders
• Trade mark applications, handled in the same back office
• Certificate printing and bound company documents, tracked by barcode
• Invoicing, credit accounts, card payments with fraud screening, and automatic posting to the accounts

Selling through partners

Two banks offered the service to their business customers through their own branded versions of the ordering site. Alongside them ran a referral network (insurance, pensions, card terminals and business finance) and a programme for accountants with their own pricing.

Working day and night

A background service filed forms, collected results from Companies House, renewed domains, sent reminders and backed everything up, around the clock.

How it ended

The business was sold in 2017 and later changed hands again. The system kept running through every change of owner, and we supported it until 2022, shortly before the business closed.

Technical details

The first version was written in Visual Basic 3. The fourth generation, rebuilt on .NET from 2006, was a Windows back office of around 1,000 source files on a shared business library, with an ASP.NET website maintained in three variants: the main site and two bank-branded sites.

Each product is its own order type, so a new line of business could be added without reworking ordering, invoicing or reporting. Companies House integration moved from printing the paper forms, to the XML Gateway in 2008, to the Companies Act 2006 schemas in 2009. A background service and command-line tool ran more than 25 scheduled tasks.

• Visual Basic
• .NET
• Windows desktop
• ASP.NET Web Forms
• SQL Server
• Companies House XML Gateway