Systems & Automation
SeaTable, Airtable and ClickUp designed, built and tidied. Integrations, data hygiene, permissions, and migrations off Zapier and other American platforms onto European ones.
Airtable · SeaTable · Make · Cloudflare Workers · Zapier migrations
Sophie's Bureau designs, builds and tidies the databases and automations that run a small consultancy or coaching practice: SeaTable, Airtable and ClickUp, integrations between them, and the migrations off Zapier and other American platforms onto European ones.
Most small businesses do not need more software. They need the two or three systems they already have to talk to each other, to hold clean data with sensible permissions, and to be written down somewhere so the founder is not the only person who understands them. That is the work of this practice.
Databases and client systems
I design and build the base that holds your clients, programmes, participants, projects or stock, and I tidy the ones that have grown sideways. Field structure, linked records, views for each person who needs them, permissions that match who should see what, and the data hygiene that makes reports trustworthy. For a UK leadership programme I built and run the participant tracking system that has followed every cohort, more than twenty of them so far; for a client whose Airtable dashboard could not answer the question they needed, I built a read-only dashboard on Cloudflare instead of paying for the add-on.
Automations and integrations
Where a task happens the same way every time, it gets automated: onboarding sequences, form-to-database, invoice triggers, progress syncs between a learning platform and the operational records. I build in Make when a no-code tool is the right fit and as a small Cloudflare Worker when reliability and cost matter more, which is more often than people expect. When a Cloudflare Worker beats Zapier or Make walks through one such job.
Migrations off American platforms
Zapier and Airtable are American companies, and in 2026 that has become more than a GDPR footnote for many of my clients. I plan and run staged moves onto European alternatives: Airtable to SeaTable, Zapier to Make or a worker, forms to Tally, analytics to Simple Analytics. Each step is tested before the old system is switched off, and the trade-offs are written down first so nobody is surprised. See leaving Zapier without leaving the EU and SeaTable as a GDPR-native alternative to Airtable.
Who this is for
Solo consultants and practices of up to around ten people whose records have outgrown a spreadsheet, whose automations have become a tangle nobody dares touch, or who want their operational data hosted in Europe. Typical clients run programmes, cohorts or an associate network.
How it is priced
A systems sprint starts from €1,450 ex-VAT and is quoted on scope. Ongoing care of the systems, small changes and new automations as the business changes, sits inside the Digital Operations Partner retainer from €1,650 a month.
Questions people ask before this kind of work
- Airtable or SeaTable?
Airtable is the more polished product and the one most people already know. SeaTable is German-built, EU-hosted by default, and its free plan covers most solo operators. If your data includes client or participant records and you would rather it stayed in Europe, SeaTable is usually the answer; if you depend on Airtable's interfaces and automations, staying and tightening permissions can be the better trade.
- Can you replace Zapier?
Usually. For most small-business automations Make does the same job and is EU-hosted. For a sync between two systems that has to be reliable and cheap, a small Cloudflare Worker often beats both, and a non-developer can maintain it once it is documented.
- Will you document what you build?
Yes, always. Every base, automation and worker comes with a written explanation of what it does, what it depends on and how to change it, so you or someone after me can run it without me.
- How long does a systems sprint take?
It depends on how many systems are involved and how much data has to move; a migration is staged so that each piece is tested before the old one is switched off. Sprints start from €1,450 ex-VAT and are quoted on scope.