A platform with no map
Allocate builds booking management software for property managers across the UK. Their platform handles room setup, availability, pricing, payments, and integrations with channels like Pitchup and Siteminder.
The software worked, but the developer who'd built it left abruptly and took all the context with them. No documentation. No handover. Just a sprawl of small services that talked to each other in ways nobody else understood. When bugs came up (and they did) fixing one thing would break another, and there was no way to predict which.
Reading someone else's mind
Allocate is made up of lots of small services - bookings, payments, availability, pricing, channel integrations - each handling a different piece of the platform.
We started by mapping these. Some were reasonably structured, and others were very out of date. Before we could fix anything, we needed to understand how all these pieces connected and where the real fragility was. This is a core part of any legacy system modernisation — understanding what exists before changing anything.
There was no shortcut for this. We were reading through years of someone else's code with no documentation to lean on. It was slow (and occasionally maddening) work, but without that understanding every fix would have been a gamble.
Once we had the picture, we prioritised ruthlessly. Critical bugs first - the ones actually affecting bookings and payments. Then we made each service safe to change and straightforward to deploy. Untangled dependencies, set up proper deployment workflows, and started delivering the features Allocate had been waiting on: new booking admin tools, supporting a new payment provider, and multiple third-party channel integrations.
Still going strong
We're still working with Allocate. That's probably the best indicator of how this went. What started as an emergency rescue turned into an ongoing partnership.
We're now systematically working through the platform - strengthening reliability, clearing technical debt, and shipping features that had been on their wishlist for years.
The platform's stable. Deploys don't break things. And Allocate has someone they can actually call when something needs to change - which, it turns out, matters more than most technical improvements.
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