It already knows your business
Outline is connected to your data and your knowledge base before the conversation starts. When you mention a customer, an order or a rule, it checks what you said against what is actually there and asks about the gaps.
Outline, by inmydata
Say what you need. Run it in days.
Outline is a spoken interview that turns what you know about your business into a specification, then into working software that reads your data, applies your people's judgment and acts. Pay for what it produces, change it whenever the business changes.
InterviewOrder approvals
- You
Approvals over ten thousand need a second signature.
- Outlinechecking the spec
Who signs? And does that include repeat customers with a clean payment history?
- Paused 17:42. Resumed 09:05 next day.
- You
Finance. And no, repeat customers are fine up to twenty.
- Outline
I'll add that as an exception. Here's how the approval queue would look.
Approval queue
Orders waiting for sign-off
1 needs a second signature1 exception
OrderCustomerAmountStatusSigner
#4471New account£4,200ApprovedAuto
#4472Trade account£12,850Second signatureFinance
#4473New account£8,900ApprovedAuto
#4474Repeat customer£16,400Second signatureExceptionAuto
Send to FinanceApprove selected
No forms, no workshops, no fifty-page document to review. A conversation you can pause and pick up, and a spec you can read.
The interview
Describe it the way you'd brief a colleague.
Outline talks to you. You explain what the software needs to do, who uses it and what goes wrong today, in your own words and at your own pace. It asks the questions a good analyst would: what happens in the exceptions, who decides, what the numbers have to reconcile to. When a screen would help, it draws one, properly, and asks whether that's what you meant.
It catches what you'd miss
A second model listens to the whole conversation and looks for holes and contradictions, the way a senior reviewer would read a spec. You hear the question before the problem reaches the software.
Pause, come back, bring someone else
The interview keeps its place. Stop for a meeting, pick it up tomorrow, or hand a section to the person who actually knows the answer.
Most of what makes software wrong is lost between the person who needs it and the person who builds it. Outline removes the gap by removing the translation.
The spec
A specification you can actually read.
At the end of the conversation you have a complete functional specification: what the software does, for whom, in which situations, and how you will know it is right. Every requirement is written so it can be tested, every flow has its exceptions, and every screen is drawn as it will look. You approve it in plain English. Nothing gets built that isn't in it.
Written to be tested
Each requirement states what the system shall do and the scenario that proves it. The same statements become the acceptance tests the factory runs.
Screens, not sketches
Mock-ups are high fidelity from the start, in your brand if you have one. Design choices are requirements too, and you make them in the interview, not after the build.
Yours to keep
The specification is a document you own. If you want to build it yourself, with us or with someone else, it is written in standard forms that any team can work from.
The spec is also what makes the next step cheap. The factory does not interpret what you meant; it builds what you approved.
The build
From approved spec to running software, in days.
The factory behind Outline takes the specification and builds the application: the screens you saw, the rules you stated, the tests that prove them. It is built on the platform that already holds your data and your people's knowledge, so the software can query what is happening right now and apply the judgment your experts gave it. Not a prototype to be rebuilt later. The thing itself, ready to run.
Software that acts
An approval that checks the order history before it asks you. An exception queue that knows which cases your best person would escalate. A month-end that reconciles itself and tells you what it couldn't. Software with the data and judgment to decide, not just a form over a database.
Built from parts that improve
Every application adds to a kit of tested components the factory reuses. Your second application is faster and cheaper than your first, and so is everyone else's.
Reviewed before it reaches you
Every build is checked against the spec's own acceptance scenarios, and a person at inmydata reviews what the factory produced before it goes live.
You see the spec before anything is built, and the working software days after you approve it. There is no stage in between where it could quietly become something else.
Keeping it right
The business will change. So will the software.
Most software is right on the day it ships and a little less right every day after. Outline is built for the opposite. When a process changes, you describe the change the same way you described the original, and the factory makes it. When a model improves, a security patch lands or your schema moves, we handle it. Keeping your software current is part of what you pay for, not a project you have to raise.
Changes are conversations
"Approvals over ten thousand now need a second signature." Say it, review the updated spec, and the software follows. No ticket, no estimate, no queue.
Patched, upgraded, kept in step
Security updates, platform releases and model upgrades are rolled out across every application we look after, with the spec's own tests run before anything changes for you.
It learns what your people know
The knowledge the software draws on keeps growing: corrections from your experts, new documents, gaps it finds and asks about. The judgment in the software gets better with use.
We call the result living software. It is what you are buying: not an application, but an application that keeps being right.
How you pay
Pay for what the factory produces.
There are no day rates for building and no project quotes. Outline charges for what it makes: specifications written, applications built, changes made. The price of an application is fixed when you approve its spec, so you know the cost before anything is built. After that, three things can cost money, and you choose which.
| Line | What it covers | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Consumption | Building and changing | Each specification, application and change has a price, agreed before the work starts. Build nothing one month and you pay nothing for building. |
| Hosting | Running it in our cloud | If you'd rather not run the platform and your applications yourself, we host them. A flat monthly fee per environment, unlimited users. Or run it in your own environment at no hosting charge. |
| Managed | Keeping it right | Patches, platform and model upgrades, and the monitoring that catches a problem before you do, across every application we look after. A monthly fee per application. |
The first conversation is free. If building the platform for your business first is a piece of work in its own right, we'll say so, estimate it, and cap it.
Talk to us about your first applicationWhere it runs and what you keep
Your data, your spec, your software.
Everything Outline produces belongs to you. The platform it runs on is being built in the open, so you can read it, run it yourself and leave with everything intact. We would rather you stayed because the software keeps being right than because leaving is hard.
Runs where you want
In our cloud, in yours, or on a server in your building. The platform runs on Windows and Linux and connects to the ERPs and databases you already have, including the ones nobody else will touch.
Your data stays yours
Row-level security, your access rules, your retention. If you leave, your data is deleted on a schedule you can see. Terms are plain and in one place.
Nothing hidden in the build
The specification is standard and readable. The platform underneath is open. The application is yours. There is no part of this you can't inspect.
Start with the thing you wish your software did.
Bring one process, one report, one decision that takes a person's judgment today. Half an hour with us and you'll know what Outline would make of it and what it would cost.