Power Apps consultant for the spreadsheet your business runs on.
Castlane is a Power Apps consultant that turns the workbook several people depend on into an application in your own Microsoft 365: one record per job, client or candidate, permissions, an audit trail, and numbers that agree.
Built by a management accountant. Fixed price after a one-week Review. How it works
When Power Apps is the right answer, and when it is not
Right when several people share one file
A workbook with four people in it has no permissions, no history and usually three versions. Power Apps gives each person a screen that shows what they need and records who changed what. The office, the engineers and the accountant see the same job.
Right when the process has steps
Quote, approve, schedule, complete, certify, invoice. A spreadsheet cannot stop a job being invoiced before it is signed off. An application can, and it can tell someone when a step is late. That is where the unbilled work and the missing certificates come from.
Wrong when one person owns a model
A costing model, a forecast or a reporting pack that one person builds and others read is often better as a properly built workbook. I will say so on the call, and build that instead from £900. Power Apps is not the answer to every spreadsheet.
What a Power Apps build from Castlane contains
- A data model in Dataverse. Clients, sites, jobs, people, and the links between them, designed by someone who knows which numbers have to reconcile at month-end.
- The office application. A model-driven app: views, a record for each job or candidate, and a process bar that shows which stage it is at. This is what the screenshot shows.
- The phone application, where needed. A canvas app for the people out of the office: log a job from a van, pick the client and site from a list, done in a minute.
- Security roles. Engineers see their jobs. The office sees everything. The accountant sees the numbers. Set once, enforced everywhere.
- The automation behind it. Reminders, approvals, summary emails and the invoicing run, built in Power Automate with a failure path on every flow.
- Reporting. Margin by job, by client and by engineer, in Power BI or straight from the app, from the same data the office enters.
Licensing, in plain terms
Power Apps is licensed by Microsoft per user or per app, and the right answer depends on what your business already pays for. Some Microsoft 365 plans include enough to run a simple app on SharePoint data; a Dataverse application usually needs a Power Apps licence for each person who uses it. Prices change, and the people who quote a build without checking are the people whose clients get a surprise invoice from Microsoft three months later.
The Review includes a licensing assessment against the tenant you have, with the monthly cost per user in writing before the build is quoted. If the licence cost would make the system poor value, the recommendation says so and points at an Excel system instead.
Proof
Anonymised
A CRM and billing portal for a London tuition group
The industry’s standard platform replaced with a Power Apps CRM on Dataverse and a billing-enabled client portal on Power Pages, used by eight staff for several hundred clients and tutors.
Anonymised
Tutor recruitment, 300 to 1,000
An application that took the tutor base from 300 to 1,000, with acquisition up 130% in six months. Counted from the tutor records in the system: tutors onboarded, checked and ready to work, not just registrations.
Demonstration, sample data
Job management for an electrical contractor
Fourteen engineers, two hundred jobs a month, one spreadsheet. The full build, with the video and screenshots, is on the Work page.
Questions about Power Apps
What does a Power Apps consultant actually do?
Works out which of your processes should become an application, designs the data behind it, builds the screens and automation in your Microsoft 365, tests it on your data, and trains your team. At Castlane that is one person from the first call to handover.
How much does a Power Apps build cost?
From £3,000, with most landing between £5,000 and £12,000 over four to ten weeks. The price is fixed after a one-week Review for £450, which is credited against the build.
Do we need to buy anything from Microsoft?
Often a Power Apps licence per user, sometimes nothing extra. It depends on the plan you already have and whether the build uses Dataverse. The Review puts the exact cost in writing before you commit.
Can our own staff change it afterwards?
Yes. It is built in your tenant with the solution files and documentation handed over. Small changes can be made by a confident administrator; larger ones by me on support or by any other Power Platform developer.
Is Power Apps only for large companies?
No. It is included with or added to the Microsoft 365 that most small businesses already pay for, which is why it suits a business of five to fifty people that has outgrown spreadsheets but cannot justify a bespoke software project.