PlusRooms works on planning data. Knowing about an application early is the whole advantage, and the only way to know early was to look.
So somebody looked. Every working day, one person went through council planning portals one at a time and copied what had changed into a spreadsheet. Each council runs its own system, several of them badly, and none of them agree on how to present anything.
It took a full working day, every day. When that person was ill or on holiday, the advantage simply stopped.
A scraping pipeline that reads the planning portals directly, on a schedule, without anyone opening a browser.
Normalisation across the different portal systems, so applications from different councils arrive in one shape that can actually be compared.
A live dashboard showing what is new and what changed, rather than a spreadsheet somebody has to interpret.
Alerts, so the interesting applications find the team rather than the team having to go looking.
Failure detection: when a council changes its portal, the pipeline says so instead of quietly returning nothing and being believed.
Each of these is set out in how we count — what it measures, the basis, how it was checked, and where we have not finished checking.
Runs on: Playwright · scheduled collection · alerting dashboard. Listed because people ask, not because it is the point — the choice of tool follows the problem.
The £1,500 Process Audit maps where your team's time actually goes, ranks what is worth automating by return, and gives you a fixed-price quote against each one — in writing, before you commit to building anything.