Soumed

The operator sells health and benefit plans in Santa Catarina, and much of its base pays the monthly fee together with the Celesc or Cerpalo electricity bill — a billing method common among membership operators. To handle it, the system reads the utility's outbound and return files, reconciles who paid and deals with who didn't.

Before the system, contracts, billing and the accredited network lived in loose spreadsheets and in a generic ERP that didn't understand this kind of operation. Charging inside the electricity bill meant reconciling files by hand, and debt negotiation was done by phone, with no record.

The system started in PHP. Halfway through it became clear that base wouldn't hold what the project had become, and the stack was rewritten without stopping the operation — the whole database, contracts, installments and billing, migrated without losing a single record.

It was the riskiest part of the project, and it's in the case because a project that only shows wins helps no one decide whether to trust us. On that base, fifteen modules — four of them hard:

Contracts, billing, negotiation and the accredited network, which lived in spreadsheets and in unlogged phone calls, moved into a single system. Charging inside the electricity bill, which no off-the-shelf ERP covered, became viable, and the billing team works inside the kanban all day.