She spent six years at a residential architecture firm downtown before opening her own studio in 2017, two rooms above a picture framer on Spring Street. It is three people now — her, a junior designer, and a bookkeeper who comes in two days a week. At any given moment she is running eleven projects. A single-room refresh in Harleston Village might be forty line items.
A whole-house renovation on Sullivan's Island runs between six and nine hundred. Every one of those lines carries a vendor, a SKU, a finish code, a fabric and a yardage if it is upholstered, a purchase order, a deposit, freight terms, a receiving warehouse, and a status that changes without anyone telling her. She tracked all of it in one spreadsheet per project and an inbox she had stopped pretending she could read. A pair of dining chairs taught her what that costs.
She specified them in March for an October install. The acknowledgment came back four days later as a PDF, and on the second page it said the fabric she had chosen was discontinued and the ship date was eleven weeks past what she had been quoted. Nobody called. Nobody flagged it.
She found it in week fourteen, three weeks out from install, while looking for something else. She re-sourced in nine days, paid expedited freight, and absorbed forty-one hundred dollars rather than tell a client her dining room would be two chairs short on move-in day. The other leak was quieter. Her receiver in North Charleston opens and inspects everything on arrival and photographs anything damaged, but a freight claim has to be filed inside a window that starts ticking the day the truck leaves.
Two claims died in a single year because the inspection report sat unopened in a shared folder — a sideboard and a nineteenth-century-style mirror, sixty-eight hundred dollars that became her problem instead of the carrier's. What we built reads her mail. Vendor acknowledgments and invoices arrive in thirty different layouts from forty-odd vendors, and it extracts the same things out of all of them: purchase order, line items, quantities, finishes, freight terms, and the ship date. Then it does the thing no human reliably does, which is compare that ship date against the one she was promised when she wrote the order, and surface the difference the day it appears rather than the month it hurts.
Every project is back-scheduled from its install date, so a slip is not reported as a slip — it is reported as "this now lands nine days after install," which is a different sentence and provokes a different phone call. It holds the live spec book for all eleven projects, so the question "where is the dining table" takes four seconds instead of an afternoon. It watches the receiver's inspection reports, opens a damage claim the moment one shows damage, attaches the photographs, drafts the claim, and counts down the filing window in plain days. It builds the client approval packet room by room, records the response with a timestamp, and keeps the trail in one place, which ended a specific kind of argument about sconces nobody remembered approving.
And it reconciles the contract allowance against what is actually specified, by category, continuously — so she learns in week six that lighting is nine thousand dollars over, when there is still time to do something about it, instead of at final billing when there is not. Seven months in, it has processed about forty-nine hundred line items across thirteen projects. It has caught seventy-one ship dates that moved without notice; nine of those would have missed install. Eleven freight claims were filed inside the window and recovered fourteen thousand two hundred dollars.
Install-day punch lists have gone from roughly forty open items to eleven. Her junior designer got back the six hours every Friday that used to go to reconciling spreadsheets. She has taken on three more projects and has not hired anyone. "The job was never picking the fabric," she said.
"The job is knowing where four hundred things are on a Tuesday."