Essence Weddings CRM

Wedding services company offering photography, videography, DJ, and formalwear. Team of about five: two sales, a coordinator, a manager, the owner.

Their existing CRM was a ColdFusion application that had been running for about twenty years. It had started sending random emails to clients, breaking often enough to be a daily problem, and the hosting and maintenance costs were rising on a codebase nobody wanted to touch. They had tried twice to replace it. Both attempts failed.

I rebuilt the system in Django with role-based permissions. A separate React client portal talks to the CRM through an API.

The Django side covers contracts, bookings, packages, internal notes, and staff tasking, with eSign and PDF generation feeding signed contracts to S3. Email notifications fire on signed contracts, new tasks, and client messages. Payments handle custom schedules, balances, and reporting for sales, tax, and AR. The client portal handles photographer choices, document review, messaging, and FAQs. Event staff get a separate mini-portal for their own schedules and tasks.

In production since April 2025. Around ten daily users. Roughly 250 contracts since launch. The random emails stopped, hosting costs dropped, and day-to-day operations now run through the system.

Most recent work: a JWT auth integration that ties the CRM to a separate FastAPI app holding the legacy archive. Two codebases, no shared database, single sign-on between them.

If you want this kind of work for your business, see operational software.