The glossary.

An operational audit is observation work. The bureau spends half a day to a full day with the team, watching the workflows run, talking to the people doing the work, reading the systems involved. It is not a strategy phase. It is not a workshop. It is structured observation, written up.

The output is a punch list. Each item is a specific operational pain point with a specific proposed fix and a fixed-fee number attached. The buyer can act on the list with the bureau, with another developer, or with their own team. The list is the deliverable; the build is a separate engagement.

Orchestrix's audit starts from £2,500. The fee credits in full against any build that follows.

Workflow automation is about the work where the 100th instance is the same as the first. Copying invoice data between systems. Generating Monday morning reports. Sending the same nine emails after every onboarding. Anything that follows a clear rule.

Custom workflow automation gives you exactly the logic you need, no per-task billing, and ownership of the code. No-code tools like Zapier or Make win for small, generic, low-volume integrations between mainstream tools.

The bureau builds custom Python or Node.js automation from £2,000 fixed-fee, scoped after a workflow audit.

Custom software earns its price tag in four scenarios: replacing three or more SaaS subscriptions, doing work no SaaS exists for, building a customer-facing portal where the software is the service, or owning the asset rather than renting it indefinitely.

A small custom build can start at £1,000 for a focused internal tool. A larger application with authentication, a custom data model, and integrations typically lands between £5,000 and £25,000. All fixed-fee, scoped after a workflow audit.

The code is yours on delivery, with documentation in plain English, in a repository you control. No licence fee, no vendor lock-in, no dependency on the bureau to keep it running.

A VPS is a virtual private server: a slice of a physical machine that behaves like a dedicated Linux box just for your application. The 'managed' part means someone is responsible for the operational work (patching, backups, uptime monitoring, incident response).

Managed VPS is the right tier for custom web applications, automation pipelines, and database-backed tools that need predictable performance and real resource isolation, but do not need the complexity or cost of full cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure).

The bureau's managed hosting is £150/month, three-month minimum term, UK-based VPS only.

A punch list is the opposite of a roadmap. A roadmap describes a future direction in vague terms; a punch list describes specific fixes the team can act on this quarter.

Each item on the list has three things: what is broken, what would fix it, and what the fix would cost. The list is ordered roughly by impact, so the team can pick whichever item delivers the most value within the available budget.

Punch lists are specific to the business they were written for. A punch list from another agency for another client is not portable; the value comes from being grounded in observation of your actual operations.

Fixed-fee transfers the risk of 'this took longer than expected' from the buyer to the consultancy. The consultancy is in a better position to estimate the work and to manage the risk, so the maths usually favours the buyer.

The honest constraint: fixed-fee only works when the deliverable is specific enough to scope. Vague engagements ('strategy', 'transformation') are usually mispriced when fixed-fee. Specific engagements ('build the integration between X and Y', 'audit the operations and produce a punch list') are exactly the right shape.

Every Orchestrix engagement is fixed-fee. There is no day-rate option, by design.

An API (application programming interface) is the official way one piece of software lets another piece of software read and write its data. Most modern SaaS tools have APIs: Xero, HubSpot, Stripe, Slack, Mailchimp, and so on.

An integration is the code that uses one API to read data and another API to write it. The bureau builds these as part of business automation engagements: a Python script that reads new sales from the CRM API every hour and writes invoices to the accounts API, for example.

Integrations break when an API changes. A managed retainer can include monitoring and adjustment for this; without one, integrations need occasional maintenance from whoever owns the code.

MPLS networks are the old way of connecting business sites: a managed private circuit between offices, run by a telco, with high reliability and high cost. A 5-country manufacturing operation might run an MPLS link costing £150,000+ per year.

MPLS made sense when broadband was unreliable. In 2026, it usually does not. Modern alternatives (SD-WAN over commodity broadband, sometimes with a 5G fallback) deliver the same business outcome at a fraction of the cost.

Migrating off MPLS is one of the fastest infrastructure cost wins for mid-sized operations. The bureau has done it; one case cut connectivity costs by 85% across 16 sites.

SD-WAN uses software to do what dedicated MPLS circuits used to do in hardware. Instead of paying a telco for an expensive private link, an SD-WAN gateway at each site routes traffic over standard broadband or fibre, automatically failing over between connections if one drops.

The cost difference is significant. Where MPLS might cost £10,000+ per site per year, SD-WAN over commodity links plus the right gateway hardware (Ubiquiti, Fortinet, others) often comes in at £2,000 per site per year all-in.

Migration risk is the real consideration. Done carefully (parallel cutover, site by site, no flag day), the migration runs without business disruption. Done badly, it can take a site offline.

Consent Mode v2 is what sits between a cookie banner and the actual analytics scripts. When a visitor accepts cookies, consent mode tells Google services 'analytics_storage: granted' and the scripts behave normally. When the visitor declines, the scripts run in a degraded mode (no cookies, no per-visitor identifiers).

Required in the UK if you run Google Analytics or Google Ads with cookies. Without it, the analytics either drop traffic without consent (bad UX, bad data) or run anyway (PECR violation).

The orchestrix.co.uk site implements Consent Mode v2 properly: defaults all Google categories to 'denied' before any script loads, lifts to 'granted' if and only if the visitor accepts.

Schedule 3 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 lists the pre-employment checks every CQC-registered care provider must perform on every staff member. There are 11 distinct items, each with its own evidence and expiry rules.

Schedule 3 compliance is not optional and not negotiable. CQC inspectors check it; failures can affect a provider's registration. The administrative work to maintain it is significant: tracking certificate expiries, chasing references, maintaining audit trails.

Orchestrix does not interpret CQC standards. The bureau builds the workflow that turns the rules into clean, automated daily work: tracking expiries, chasing missing evidence, surfacing what a registered manager needs to act on. The rule itself stays with the client's compliance lead.

Quarterly retainers in the consulting industry are often a structural problem: ongoing capacity charges for work that is not always there. The bureau's managed retainer is different by design: it covers actual ongoing work (hosting the build, watching for incidents, applying small adjustments) at a fixed monthly fee.

Pricing is from £150/month. Cancellable on 30 days notice after the three-month minimum term. The build keeps running if you cancel; ownership stays with the client.

There is no retainer until there is something worth retaining. The bureau will not propose a retainer at the start of a relationship.