You already know how your process works — you built it. This page is only about the how of automating it: where your questions live, what you actually do during a session, where the answers go, how the scores get calculated, and how the documents come back to you.
Nothing about how you work changes. The typing, counting and reformatting is what goes away.
This is the screen you would be looking at while you are on the phone with a client. Read the question aloud, click what they say, move on. Try it — press 1 to 5 on your keyboard, or click.
Every organisation gets a file. Inside it is every session you have ever run with them, each with its date and its scores. This is what makes the ninety-day comparison possible — it is just two sessions sitting next to each other.
| Organisation | Session | Date | Questions | Overall | Documents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life Management Centers | Training review | Apr 2026 | 13 | — | Evaluation, diagnostic, plan |
| Life Management Centers | Implementation baseline | Aug 2026 | 100 | — | — |
| Life Management Centers | Day-90 re-measure | Nov 2026 | 100 | — | Progress comparison |
| Next client | Training review | — | 13 | — | — |
The greyed rows have not happened yet. They are there to show that the same template serves every client and every repeat session, with no rebuilding.
Stage four is the only stage I cannot build on my own. Everything else is plumbing I have done many times. The scoring is yours.
I tried to reproduce your pillar scores from the thirteen survey answers alone and could not — working only from those answers I get numbers that come out almost flat, while yours run from 82 to 88 with a clear order to them. That tells me your scoring draws on things the answer sheet does not contain: the comments, what you observed in the room, what you already knew about that board, and your own judgment.
I am not asking you to change any of it. I am asking you to describe it, so it can be written down once and then applied automatically forever after. Once it is written down, the session you just clicked through produces your scores by itself.
And if part of it should stay judgment, that is a good answer too — we build those as fields you fill in, and the software does the rest around them.
The practical difference. Today the counting, the grid, the percentages and the reformatting sit between you and the finished documents. Automated, the session ends and the drafts are already waiting. Your time moves to the part only you can do — reading the organisation and advising it.
The real answer, not the diagram version.
It lives in the cloud, in accounts opened in your name. You reach it from any browser — your laptop, a hotel computer, your phone in a car park before a board meeting. Nothing is installed. Nothing is tied to one machine. You can export everything you own at any time, and if you ever stopped working with me you would keep all of it.
Why not just on your computer? It is genuinely possible, and there are three reasons I would talk you out of it.
You could not send a board member a link to answer on their own. It would only work at that one desk, so no working from a client's office. And a single hard-drive failure would take every client file you have with it — including the ones you are contractually holding for other people.
This is the part worth understanding, because it means you are not locked into anyone's ecosystem. Each job can be chosen separately and swapped later.
| A · No-code | B · Purpose-built | C · Microsoft | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The screen | Airtable Interfaces | A web page built for this, like the one above | Microsoft Forms |
| The database | Airtable | Supabase (a hosted database) | SharePoint, inside your own Microsoft account |
| The documents | DocsAutomator or Documint | Built in, no add-on | Word templates via Power Automate |
| Rough monthly | $20–50 | $20–45 | $0–15 on top of what you already pay |
| Live-session feel | Workable, but not built for conversation pace | Exactly what you described | Weakest — Forms is not made for this |
| Who can maintain it | Any Airtable freelancer | Someone who can read code | Any Microsoft consultant |
| You can see raw data | Yes, like a spreadsheet | Yes, through a screen I build | Yes, it is a list in your account |
Prices checked August 2026: Airtable Team $20/seat/month billed annually · Supabase free tier, $25/month once it needs to stay always-on · Vercel $20/month, as their free tier does not permit business use · DocsAutomator free to 100 documents/month · Microsoft 365 Business Standard $14.50/user/month from July 2026. Figures move; these are current as of this week.
Start with the cheapest possible version of one thing, and use it for real. You have a client beginning implementation next week. That is a better test than any amount of planning.
Concretely: I build the thirteen-question session screen as a working tool, with a proper database behind it, and you use it on your next live call. It costs almost nothing to stand up. If it makes that call easier, we do the hundred questions the same way. If it does not, you have lost a week of my time and none of your money.
What I would not do is decide the whole platform tonight. Once you have run two real sessions you will know things about how you work that neither of us can guess at right now, and those answers are worth more than picking a tool early.
Two things I want to say plainly, because they matter more than the price.
Everything is in your name. The accounts, the data, the documents. Not mine, not my company's. You would have the passwords. I would work inside your accounts, not hold your work inside mine.
Option B depends on a developer, and that is a real risk to you. If we build something custom and I am unavailable, you need someone who can pick it up. The way I would handle that is to keep it simple and ordinary on purpose, write down how it works, and make sure the code sits in your account too. Worth saying out loud rather than discovering later — and it is the honest argument in favour of Option A if you would rather never depend on one person.
Building it is one number. Keeping it breathing is a different, much smaller one — and that is the one that matters to you long-term.
| A · No-code | B · Purpose-built | C · Microsoft | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly to stay alive | $20–50 | $0–25 | $0 beyond what you pay now |
| If you stop paying | Base drops to the free tier — data stays visible and exportable, some features switch off | System goes to sleep; data stays exportable. Nothing is deleted for non-payment | Nothing changes; it rides your existing subscription |
| What never goes away | Your data. Every option keeps a full export — spreadsheets and Word files — you can download any time and keep forever | ||
Option B's floor: the page itself can host free on Cloudflare Pages, whose free plan explicitly allows business use — so the only recurring bill is the database at $25/month, and even that has a free tier if the system is used at least weekly.
Does it need me to stay running? No — and that is by design. Once built, nothing changes unless someone changes it. There is no monthly maintenance ritual. The realistic support pattern is what a plumber calls break-fix: it runs on its own, and you call when you want something changed — a question reworded, a new document template, a tweak to the scoring.
Two promises that make that safe for you: everything sits in your accounts, so nothing about your business is hostage to my availability. And the build is documented as we go, so any competent person could pick it up cold. You are buying a system, not a dependency.
I checked, because you should not be anyone's experiment.
What you do — a structured question set completed by a board, scored into a capacity report, followed by a consulting engagement — is an established category with working products in it. The best-known is TCC Group's Core Capacity Assessment Tool: 146 questions, completed online by leaders and board members, scored into a report across nearly forty categories. It has run for years and consultants build whole practices on it. A research-based cousin called iCAT does the same job, and the Ford Foundation publishes a free facilitated version.
Why this is good news and not competition: those tools prove the machine works — boards will complete online assessments, the scoring holds up, consultants profitably run businesses on exactly this shape. But every one of them scores someone else's generic framework. Yours scores Power5SynrG. The category validates the machine; your five pillars stay the product. When it is built, you will have what CCAT's owners have — except branded to your method and owned by you.
The same is true one level down, in the parts. The question-and-answer engine I would build on is an open-source library called SurveyJS — free for commercial use, built specifically for scored assessments, run by thousands of organisations with the data kept in their own database. The document generation, the client files, the sign-in: all standard, proven parts. Nothing in this build would be invented. It is assembly of things with years of production use behind them — which is exactly what makes it supportable on a break-fix basis rather than needing a full-time engineer.
Step by step, with honest effort against each piece.
Nothing is installed on your computer, and nothing is built on it. Think of it like online banking: your bank did not put software on your laptop. You go to a web address, sign in, and your information is held safely on their side. This works the same way — except the accounts holding it are yours, not a bank's.
The work happens on my machine, and the finished thing gets published to a rented server. You get a web address and a password. That is the whole of your involvement with the technology.
The session screen you just clicked through is not a mock-up. It is the real thing, already written. What it cannot do yet is remember anything — refresh the page and your answers are gone. Most of the list below is about giving it a memory.
| # | Piece | What it means | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Somewhere to save | A database with three lists in it: organisations, sessions, answers. Set up once. | Half a day |
| 2 | A sign-in | So it is yours and not open to the public. Comes ready-made with the database. | Half a day |
| 3 | Your client list | The screen where you pick an organisation, or add a new one, before starting. | 1 day |
| 4 | Questions become editable | Right now the thirteen questions are written into the page. They move into the database so the hundred-question set can live beside them and you can change wording yourself. | 1 day |
| 5 | Your scoring | Written down once, then applied automatically forever. Blocked until you describe it. | 1–2 days |
| 6 | The documents | Your four documents rebuilt as templates that fill themselves in. The biggest single piece, because matching your formatting exactly takes care. | 3–4 days |
| 7 | Send-a-link mode | A private link per board member, for when you are not doing it live. | 1 day |
| 8 | Publishing it | Putting it on the server and pointing a web address at it. | Half a day |
All of it together is roughly two to three weeks of my time, spread over calendar weeks rather than worked straight through.
But I would not build all of it before you have used any of it. Pieces 1, 2, 3 and 8 are about four days, and they give you a working tool you could use on a real call — sessions that save, a client list you can return to, reachable from anywhere. No document generation yet, no hundred questions yet. Just the part that replaces the paper and the grid.
Use that on one live client call. What you learn from that hour will tell us more about pieces 5, 6 and 7 than any conversation we could have first.
And the honest alternative. Assembling it from the no-code parts instead — Option A on the table above — is closer to two or three days, because it is configuring existing products rather than building. You would trade the session screen feeling exactly right for never depending on a developer.
If that trade appeals to you more, say so and I will build it that way instead. It is a legitimate choice, not a lesser one.