Eight hundred and sixty people. Are you seriously writing software for this?
Yes, at the right size and the right price. What we would not do is bring a proposal built for a company of two hundred. A village this size gets one well-defined thing that removes a recurring evening of work, quoted as a fixed job, handed over and owned by you. If that is not worth the money we will say so and leave.
Our clerk keeps everything in her head and in a cabinet. Where would you start?
By getting the cabinet indexed, not by changing how she works. Old ordinances, minutes and cemetery ledgers scanned and made searchable is the highest-value first step, because it is the part that disappears when someone retires. She keeps deciding things; the difference is that the next person can find what was decided.
I do custom work for neighbours and bill when I get round to it. Is that really a problem?
It is if the unbilled pile is larger than you think, and it usually is. The fix is not chasing people harder — it is that the invoice gets raised the week the field is finished, with the acres and dates on it, so nobody has to reconstruct an argument in January. Neighbours pay faster when the bill is prompt and obviously right.
Would you work for the school district or is that too big a client?
It is the right size, and a district is often the best first project in a community like this because so much else schedules around it. Illini Bluffs runs buses out to farms on Kingston Mines Road and Glasford Canton Road, which is its own scheduling problem. We would keep the first build narrow — a calendar families trust, absences, facility bookings — and everything about a pupil sits behind proper access control with a staff approval on anything sent out.
Who owns what we build and what goes into it?
Your organisation does, on accounts in its name, from the first day. Records, rosters, billing history and scanned documents come out in ordinary formats whenever you ask for them. We work under NDA, we are a US-based team, and there is no clause anywhere that makes it expensive to walk away from us.
Do you actually need artificial intelligence for any of this?
For reading old paper, yes — turning a shelf of ordinances or a cemetery ledger into something searchable is exactly what a machine is for. For sign-ups, billing and calendars, no, and we build those as plain software because it is cheaper and more predictable. Anyone selling a village of this size an AI platform is selling you something.
What does the review gate mean for a fire department or a church?
It means nothing goes out with your name on it that a person has not read. Drafts wait in a queue — we call it SolaceSentry — until an officer approves them, and the system records who did. For an organisation whose credibility is entirely local, that is the whole point.
How long, and what does it cost?
We map the process with you first, in one session, then quote a fixed figure against that map. Small builds here run four to six weeks. If during the mapping it turns out a free sign-up tool or an existing product does the job, we tell you and you have lost nothing but an afternoon.