Someone who has done the job, and someone who builds systems for a living. Same person.
Most hire software is built by software companies who have had the problem described to them. UnitOps was built by someone who has spent twenty years on both sides of it: loading vans at six in the morning, and running enterprise IT for organisations that cannot afford to get it wrong.
I came up through the entertainment industry - live sound, lighting, production. I still do it. I run Sonic Sound UK, a sound and lighting hire and event production company in Somerset, and I work with hire firms and event companies week in, week out.
So the problems in UnitOps are not features somebody thought would be useful. They are the things that have actually gone wrong on my own jobs and on the jobs of people I work alongside:
Every one of those has a specific answer in UnitOps because every one of those has cost me money.
The rest of my career has been enterprise IT. I moved from production into technology, spent years as IT manager for a medical software company - a regulated environment where data handling, auditability and uptime are not optional - and I am now Head of IT and Data Protection Officer for a large motor retail group, running infrastructure, security and compliance across multiple sites and multiple companies.
That is the half of this you cannot see from the outside, and it is the half that matters once your business depends on it:
Where the data is held, who can reach it and how long it is kept are written down rather than promised - see the privacy notice.
Software people build hire systems that are technically excellent and miss how the work actually happens - forms that assume you are sitting at a desk, when you are standing in an aisle with a torch in your teeth.
Hire people build systems that understand the job perfectly and fall apart the first time two people use them at once, or a client asks a hard question about where their data lives.
UnitOps exists because I have had to be both. The bookings module knows what a dry hire is. The permissions model knows what least privilege is. Both matter.
The fair question to ask about software built by an individual is what happens if that individual is not there.
UnitOps is backed by Wolf Logic, a software company with full knowledge of the system and full access to it. They are not a name on a page - they know the codebase, they can support and maintain it, and they can keep it running and keep customers looked after if I am unavailable, for a week or permanently.
That is the difference between a product and a hobby. You get the responsiveness of dealing directly with the person who built the thing, without your business depending on him personally being at his desk.
You are not buying from a support portal. You are buying from the person who wrote it, who still runs kit out of a warehouse most weekends, and who will answer your email himself - with a software company behind him so that “personal” never means “precarious”.
If you have a problem, tell me about it. If it is a good idea, it tends to get built.
Andrew Samuel
Founder, UnitOps
Either is fine.