Case study
Novera MissionsFrom signed placement to cash collected: the back-office that replaces the spreadsheet of a freelance recruitment business.
The post-placement operations tool of Novera Talent: clients, freelancers, missions, activity reports, invoices, payments and margins — centralised and made reliable. Under construction, it is gradually replacing a spreadsheet that had become unreadable.
- Role
- Design · Product · Development
- Solo
- Year
- 2026
- Type
- Post-placement back-office · staffing / freelance
- 01Client
- 02Freelancer
- 03Mission
- 04Report
- 05Invoice
- 06Payment
- 07Margin
The challenge
I ran the entire freelance / staffing side of Novera Talent in a single spreadsheet: clients, prospects, freelancers, placements, activity reports, margins, day-rate simulations, KPIs. Past a few dozen placements, that file becomes unreadable and fragile.
The concrete pains: no alert when a contract is about to end (risk of losing a mission), manual activity-report entry, error-prone margin formulas, no invoice generation from the report, no structured tracking of payments and unpaid invoices, no audit trail on sensitive changes.
The solution: a full-cycle back-office
A single source of truth covering the full business cycle: client → freelancer → mission → activity report → invoice → payment → margin.
Clients & freelancers
Centralised directory of clients, contacts and freelancers.
Missions
Placements, dates, day rates — the core of operational tracking.
Activity reports
Structured activity-report entry — no more scattered spreadsheet tabs.
Invoicing
Invoice generation from the validated activity report.
Payments & unpaid
Tracking of receipts and follow-ups, from signed to paid.
Automatic margins
Gross margin, margin rate and monthly revenue computed without brittle formulas.
Deadline alerts
Contract ends and late reports flagged — no more lost missions.
Audit trail
Log of critical actions: day rate, report validation, invoice, payment.
Under the hood
A fully typed Next.js monolith with a clear boundary: Novera Missions does no sourcing (that’s the ATS and Megasearch) — it owns post-placement. The priority: a finished, used MVP rather than a complete product never shipped.
Business data model
Every step of the cycle (client, freelancer, mission, report, invoice, payment) is a typed entity — the structure a spreadsheet could never guarantee.
Reliable margin calculations
Gross margin, margin rate and monthly revenue computed by the system, isolated and tested — no more broken spreadsheet formulas.
Clear boundary with the ATS
The ATS owns the candidate funnel (sourcing → mandate → signed placement); Novera Missions owns post-placement (report, invoice, payment, margin). Two decoupled lifecycles (ADR-0005).
Traceability
Audit log on sensitive actions — day-rate change, report validation, invoice issuance, marked-as-paid.
My role: everything, solo
I design and build Novera Missions alone, for my own business — the best way to understand, from the inside, the constraints of a management tool actually used day to day.
Product & scoping
Scope reduction (MVP < 30% of the backlog), full-cycle prioritisation.
Design
Dense interface, aligned with the Novera design system.
Full-stack development
Data model, margin logic, invoicing, tests.
Novera Missions is the invisible counterpart of recruitment: what happens once the freelancer is placed. Building it forces me to model margin, invoicing and deadlines cleanly — exactly the topics that the staffing firms and freelancers I recruit live with.