SaaS · AI/ML Solutions
Custom CRM Development for a Cross-Border Staffing Business
A cloud-based CRM and lead management system that connects Western European employers, Eastern European staffing agencies, and SAMAGO's own team in one workflow from website enquiry to signed contract to SevDesk invoice.
01 - About Client
About Our Partner
Our partner in this project is Accelys Survey, a SaaS company building at scale.
Company Overview
SurveySage is the flagship product of Accelys Survey, built on the mission of empowering every business and researcher to collect impactful data effortlessly through smart, AI-driven survey technology.
Project Timeline
TODO(loam): engagement length
Engagement Type
Full-stack SaaS product build
Discover the challenge and how we solved it
Continue →02 - Project Overview
From Lead to Contract: A Centralized CRM for Staffing Operations
SAMAGO needed a centralized way to manage leads, customers, suppliers, contracts, tasks, and invoicing across its staffing operations. LOAM built a cloud-based CRM that connects the lead-to-contract workflow with role-based dashboards and SevDesk integration, helping streamline recruitment and sales operations in one platform.
SAMAGO is a German staffing intermediary. Its business model sits between two parties: companies in Western Europe that need temporary workers, and staffing agencies in Eastern Europe that supply them. SAMAGO's job is to match demand with supply, agree terms with both sides, and keep the relationship running.
That model creates a CRM problem most off-the-shelf tools don't solve well. A typical CRM tracks one relationship — company to customer. SAMAGO needed to track three: its team, its customers, and its suppliers, each with different permissions, different documents, and different things they need to see.
What LOAM built: SAMAGO CRM, a cloud-based lead management and sales operations platform. Leads arrive from SAMAGO's public website (Zeitarbeit International), move through a managed pipeline, become contracts that customers and suppliers can review and respond to, and feed into SevDesk for invoicing and accounting. Admins, sub-admins, customers, and suppliers each get their own dashboard.
LOAM's role: End-to-end delivery — requirement analysis, UX and system design, frontend and backend development, third-party integration, AWS deployment, and ongoing support. [NEEDS CLIENT/LOAM CONFIRMATION — confirm LOAM's role as described; the source description is written in the first person by an individual developer.]
Why it mattered: Before the CRM, lead handling, contract negotiation, and communication with two sets of external parties were spread across separate tools and channels. Every handoff was a place for information to go missing. Centralising this was less about "digital transformation" and more about SAMAGO's team being able to see, in one place, where every lead and every contract stood.
Key Metrics
Custom CRM
CRM Solution
Lead-to-Contract
Lead Management
CodeIgniter + AWS
Technology
SevDesk API
Integration
03 - Challenge & Goals
SAMAGO’s recruitment and sales operations were spread across emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected processes, making it difficult to manage leads, coordinate customers and suppliers, track contracts, and maintain clear pipeline visibility. The challenge was to bring these workflows into one secure CRM while keeping each user’s data and access properly separated.
Understanding both the business and technical landscape
Business & Operations
Enquiries from the website and other channels had no single destination, so pipeline visibility depended on individual team members rather than the system. Contract handling added a second layer of complexity: every placement involves terms with a customer and terms with a supplier, and managing acceptances, rejections, and revisions across both sides by email or spreadsheet was slow and error-prone. On top of this, management had no ready way to see lead performance, pipeline health, or team activity without manually compiling data.
Technical Constraints
The CRM needed role-based access to keep customer and supplier information separate while allowing administrators to manage both. Built with CodeIgniter and PHP and hosted on AWS EC2, the system also needed to handle customer and supplier data securely, support reliable communication and notifications, integrate with SevDesk for invoicing, and maintain smooth performance as the number of users and records increased.
Success Goals
Centralized Lead Management
Bring website enquiries and the sales pipeline into one centralized CRM, giving SAMAGO better visibility across its lead management process.
Role-Based CRM Access
Provide admins, customers, and suppliers with role-specific dashboards and permissions while keeping relevant business information properly separated.
Streamlined Contract & Workflow Management
Manage customer and supplier contracts, approvals, tasks, reminders, activity, and communication within one platform.
Integrated Reporting & Invoicing
Provide real-time lead and pipeline reporting while connecting the CRM with SevDesk to simplify invoicing and reduce manual data entry.
04 - Discovery & Strategy
Engineering Discovery
The project started with face-to-face sessions with SAMAGO's team, including business analysts and stakeholders from several departments. LOAM used these to map how leads, contracts, and communication actually moved through the business — not how the org chart said they should — and to identify where the existing setup broke down. From that analysis LOAM produced process flow charts, system architecture, and UI/UX designs. Wireframes were built and reviewed with SAMAGO in iterations, with each round approved before development began. A competitor analysis was also carried out to establish what existing CRM and staffing tools did and didn't cover.
Role-Based Access & Data Visibility
Finding
Customers, suppliers, and admins needed access to the same CRM while having different data visibility requirements.
Decision
Build a role-based access control model as the foundation, with separate dashboards per role rather than one UI with hidden elements
Outcome
Customers and suppliers only ever see data scoped to them; admins get a cross-cutting view
Contract Management
Finding
Customer and supplier contracts required multiple actions, including acceptance, rejection, and modifications
Decision
Manage contract workflows directly within the CRM instead of handling contract communication through separate email threads.
Outcome
Contract actions and related information remain organized within the CRM, making the process easier to track.
Website Lead Capture
Finding
Leads coming through the Zeitarbeit International website needed to be added to the CRM without manual entry.
Decision
Integrate lead capture from zeitarbeit-international.de directly into the CRM pipeline
Outcome
New enquiries land in the pipeline without manual entry
Multi-Device Access
Finding
Customers, suppliers, and internal users access the CRM from different devices and need to work with the platform easily.
Decision
Build responsive interfaces across the different user dashboards.
Outcome
Users can access their relevant CRM functions, contracts, messages, and activities across different screen sizes.
05 - System Architecture
Custom CRM Architecture for Staffing & Lead Management
SAMAGO CRM is built as a cloud-based PHP application that connects lead management, customer and supplier workflows, contract management, communication, and invoicing in one centralized platform. The architecture combines a responsive web interface, CodeIgniter backend, MySQL database, AWS EC2 hosting, and SevDesk integration to support secure and efficient staffing operations.
CRM User Interface
A responsive web interface gives admins, customers, and suppliers access to role-specific dashboards and CRM functions. Dynamic interactions support lead management, contracts, tasks, messages, and other workflow actions without requiring unnecessary page reloads.
CRM Application & Business Logic
The CodeIgniter and PHP backend manages the core CRM functionality, including lead management, sales pipelines, customer and supplier workflows, contract actions, task tracking, activity management, reporting, authentication, and role-based access.
CRM Data Management
The database layer centralizes leads, users, customers, suppliers, contracts, tasks, messages, and activity data, providing the structured foundation required to manage staffing and recruitment workflows efficiently.
Website & Business Integrations
SAMAGO CRM connects the Zeitarbeit International website with the CRM lead pipeline so new enquiries can enter the workflow directly. The platform also integrates with SevDesk to support the invoicing process and reduce manual data handling.
Cloud Hosting & Access Control
The CRM is hosted on AWS EC2 and uses role-based access to provide different levels of information and functionality for administrators, customers, and suppliers. This structure helps keep business data appropriately separated while allowing internal teams to manage operations from one platform.
System Design Philosophy
Each layer serves a specific purpose and can be scaled or updated independently. The separation of concerns ensures that critical systems evolve cleanly without forcing risky changes across the full platform at once.
06 - What We Built
Platform Architecture
We built SAMAGO CRM as a centralized platform for managing leads, customers, suppliers, contracts, tasks, communication, reporting, and invoicing. Each capability supports a key part of the staffing workflow, helping SAMAGO manage its operations from incoming enquiry through contract management and invoicing. A connected CRM experience that brings staffing, recruitment, sales, and operational workflows into one platform.
Each system is designed to operate independently while contributing to a unified platform experience.
Lead Intake & Pipeline Management
System 01
Role-based dashboards for admins, customers, and suppliers
System 02
Real-time reporting
System 03
SevDesk integration for invoicing and accounting
System 04
Lead Intake & Pipeline Management
Leads from the Zeitarbeit International website flow directly into the CRM instead of into an inbox. From there, SAMAGO's team moves each lead through the sales pipeline, with status, ownership, and history recorded at every stage.
- ✓Website enquiries captured directly in the CRM
- ✓Centralized lead and sales pipeline management
- ✓Lead status, ownership, and activity tracked
- ✓Less manual data entry and better pipeline visibility
Role-based dashboards for admins, customers, and suppliers
Each user type gets its own dashboard and permission set. Admins and sub-admins see the full picture — leads, contracts, users, reports. Customers see their own requests, contract status, and support interactions. Suppliers see the contracts and tasks relevant to them.
- ✓Separate dashboards for admins, customers, and suppliers
- ✓Role-based permissions and data access
- ✓Admin and sub-admin access for CRM management
- ✓Customer and supplier information kept appropriately separated
Real-time reporting
Admins can generate reports on lead performance, pipeline activity, and other operational metrics directly from live data.
- ✓Lead performance and pipeline activity reporting
- ✓Reports generated from live CRM data
- ✓Clear visibility into pipeline and team activity
- ✓Faster access to operational insights
SevDesk integration for invoicing and accounting
The CRM connects to SevDesk via its API so that invoicing and financial reporting draw on CRM data rather than requiring re-entry.
- ✓SevDesk API integration
- ✓CRM data connected with invoicing workflow
- ✓Reduced duplicate data entry
- ✓Existing accounting workflow retained
07 - Delivery & Engineering
How We Delivered
Discover
Mapped SAMAGO’s lead, customer, supplier, contract, and operational workflows to define the CRM structure and user roles.
Output: Workflow mapping and CRM requirements
Design
Designed the CRM interface and role-based dashboards for admins, customers, and suppliers, refining the experience through user testing
Output: UI/UX design and role-based dashboard structure
Build
Developed the CRM with lead management, contract workflows, task tracking, reporting, communication, and SevDesk integration.
Output: Working CRM platform covering the core staffing workflow
Validate
Tested the application through unit, integration, system, and user-acceptance testing, followed by final production-environment testing.
Output: Validated CRM ready for production
Deploy
Deployed the application on AWS EC2 and completed final production checks before go-live.
Output: Production-ready SAMAGO CRM with ongoing maintenance and support
Strategic Decisions
Key Engineering Decisions
Challenge
Generated surveys were fluent but methodologically weak -- leading questions, double-barrelled items and missing scales that made downstream analysis meaningless
Decision
Ground generation in a curated library of validated instruments and require structured, typed output, so the model composes from known-good patterns instead of inventing question structure
Outcome
TODO(loam): quantify the improvement in generated-survey quality
Challenge
Re-reading every free-text answer through a language model on each dashboard load made analytics slow and cost scale with dashboard views rather than data volume
Decision
Score sentiment and assign themes once, at ingestion, and persist the result; reserve read-time model calls for narrative summaries over an already-clustered set
Outcome
TODO(loam): quantify dashboard latency and analysis cost improvement
Challenge
Owners needed to promise respondents genuine anonymity while still deduplicating responses and honouring a delete request against a specific submission
Decision
Separate the delivery identity from the stored response at write time, keeping only a one-way handle that supports dedup and deletion but cannot be resolved back to a respondent
Outcome
Anonymity is a real guarantee rather than a UI setting, and it survives export and reporting
Challenge
Serving a free self-serve tier and HIPAA or FERPA-scoped enterprise tenants from one codebase, without either compromising the other
Decision
Express residency, retention, audit-log depth and permission granularity as workspace-level policy rather than product tiers, with private AWS or Azure hosting available per tenant
Outcome
Regulated workspaces are locked down through configuration, leaving the self-serve experience untouched
08 - Impact & Testimonial
The Results
Primary Business Impact
TODO
TODO(loam): headline outcome -- e.g. reduction in time from research question to insight
Business Metrics
Engineering Metrics
Before & After
“They truly understand our needs, identify ways to improve things, and provide creative and relevant ideas.”
Abood Mansour
IT Manager
Zeitarbeit international