Build Your Own CRM

The problem isn't discipline

A five-person business signs up for a big-name CRM, uses three features, pays for forty, and is back in a spreadsheet within two months. That isn't a failure of follow-through.

What usually happens

The software arrives with its own idea of how business works — Accounts, Opportunities, Leads — and the job becomes translating your world into its vocabulary.

A plumber doesn't have a sales funnel. They have jobs, quotes and callbacks. Fields that don't apply get left blank, blank fields make the data untrustworthy, and untrustworthy data gets abandoned.

What Nimble Clerk does

It asks a question no other CRM asks first: what do you want to track? Then it builds around that answer.

Jobs, quotes and callbacks — or job sites, equipment, bookings, patients, commissions. Whatever your business runs on becomes a first-class part of the system, with the same tables, boards, search and export as anything built in.

Five minutes, start to finish

This is the whole setup — not a trimmed-down trial version of it.

Choose what you track

Start from ready-made modules — Contacts, Deals, Tasks, Leads, Companies, Notes, Renewals — and tick the ones that match how you work. Set your business name and currency while you're there.

Bring the spreadsheet you already have

Your real CRM today is probably a spreadsheet, so importing one is treated as the main event rather than an afterthought. Upload a CSV and columns are matched to fields automatically; anything unmatched can become a new field without leaving the screen.

It handles what spreadsheets actually produce: quoted commas, Excel's encoding, $1,234.00 and €1 234 as amounts, bracketed negatives, and yes/no as tick boxes. And it asks which way round your dates are written — 03/04/2026 is 3 April or 4 March and the file doesn't say — working the answer out from the file where it can, and asking you where it can't, rather than guessing and putting half of them in the wrong month.

Work your pipeline on a board

Any module with a dropdown gets a drag-and-drop board. Its columns are your own options, in your own order — Quoted, Scheduled, Invoiced, Paid, if that's the business you're in. Each column shows its count and total, so the board doubles as a live value report.

Build anything that's missing

Need something the templates don't cover? Name it, choose fields from eleven types — including links between modules — and it's ready. Under two minutes, no admin console, no support ticket.

Take it with you

Install it to your home screen or desktop. It keeps working with no connection at all — on site, in a van, in a basement — and syncs when you're back. Records added offline are never lost.

What comes as standard

No tiers that withhold the basics.

Twelve field types

Text, numbers, currency, dates, dropdowns, tick boxes, email, phone, links, relationships between modules — and calculated columns.

Columns that work themselves out

A calculated field totals, averages or compares other number columns in the same record. Read-only, recomputed every time it is shown, and it reaches the export. It is a tick list rather than a formula box, so a total is easy and (a − b) ÷ c is not possible.

Under the table, every column of numbers carries a total of its own — a sum by default, or an average, a minimum, a maximum, or how many rows are filled. It totals the rows on screen, so a search narrows it and says how many it covered, and the choice belongs to the module so the whole team reads the same figure.

And any module with a date column can be grouped by week or by month, each period carrying its own totals beside the overall ones. A production log, an invoice ledger or an expense sheet becomes a period report without a second screen to build or maintain.

Search that reaches everything

Matches every field, including ones you've chosen not to show as columns.

Sorting that understands data

Money sorts numerically, dates chronologically, and pipeline stages sort in pipeline order — not alphabetically.

Genuine offline use

Not a cached read-only copy. Add, edit and delete with no signal; it reconciles when you reconnect.

Your data, exportable

CSV per module, JSON for the whole workspace. No export limits, no plan gate, no lock-in.

A nudge, once a day

Point the workspace at your Slack, Discord or Telegram channel and it posts a morning count of what is due or overdue. Counts, never record names — a chat channel usually has more people in it than your CRM does.

Certificates that expire

A Renewals register for insurance, trade licences, safety checks and vehicle inspections — and because it is an ordinary module with a date on it, the filter and the morning count already work on it. Thirty days' notice instead of a client asking first. The look-ahead is one setting for the whole workspace, so pick the longest thing you track.

Chasing what is owed

Open an overdue record and the reminder is written for you — the reference, the balance, the days late, and the line every real dunning email carries. It opens in your email app from your address, so it reads like you rather than like a robot. Nothing is sent from the app, and no key or third party is involved.

If you would rather it just went, connect your own Resend or Postmark account and a Send it now button appears beside the draft. Your key, your domain, your bill — and still nothing automatic: a person presses it every time.

And it remembers. The button reads Chase again once somebody has, and the preview names who and when — so two people on a team do not send the same customer two demands for the same money on the same afternoon.

The customers nobody has called

Every business has past buyers nobody has contacted in years. The same review that answers “how long do you keep this?” asks that one too — aged on a date you pick rather than on the record's last edit, narrowed to one module and one tag, out as CSV. It only knows what you logged, and it says how many records were never logged at all.

The awkward questions, answered

Record why you may hold each person's details. Search every field — including ones you removed — when somebody asks what you hold about them. See what nothing has touched in two years. It reports; you decide.

Admin and analytics

Running it for a team or for clients? Accounts, roles, activity, signups and per-tenant usage are built in.

If you're using…	The difference
A spreadsheet	Keep the flexibility, gain pipelines, search, reminders and a phone-friendly interface — and import the sheet in one step rather than starting again.
A large CRM	Narrower on purpose. No per-seat pricing, no configuration project, and nothing to switch off. You build the ten percent you use.
A general database tool	Those start as a blank canvas you must design. This opens as a working CRM — pipelines, currency, boards — and installs as an offline app.
Nothing yet	Start with three modules and one habit: enter every enquiry the day it arrives. Add the rest once you know what you're missing.

Questions worth asking

Can our whole team use it?

Yes. A team shares one workspace, and an owner invites people with a private link — no per-seat fee, because there are no seats to buy. Sync works one record and one field at a time, so two people editing different records both keep their work, and so do two people editing different fields of the same record.

Four roles decide who can do what: owners change the schema and manage the team, members work with records, contributors add and edit but can't delete, and viewers read only. The server enforces it rather than just hiding buttons.

The honest limit, so you don't discover it later: everyone on a team sees every module. Roles govern what you can do, not what you can see, and per-module access isn't built.

Where does our data live?

On your device first, always. If you sign in, a copy syncs to the database behind your deployment. For businesses that need physical separation, we offer a dedicated deployment with its own database and its own domain.

What if we want to leave?

Export everything as JSON or per-module CSV, whenever you like, with no limits. It's also a standard web application, so you can host it yourself and keep running it without us.

How much data can it hold?

Comfortably into the thousands of records per workspace. Beyond that we'd move you onto dedicated infrastructure — which is a change we make, not a migration you have to run.

Does it help with GDPR?

With the parts a tool can help with. There's a template for recording why you may hold each person's details and where they came from; a search that answers “what do you hold about me” across every text field, including names that only appear as a link and values under fields you've since removed; and a review of what nothing has touched in a window you choose, so a retention policy is something you can act on rather than only write down.

What it doesn't do is make you compliant. Which lawful basis applies, and how long to keep a record, are your decisions — and nothing here deletes anything on your behalf. Our own half of the arrangement, as the people running the service for you, is written out on the terms page.

Does it connect to our other tools?

CSV in and out is the integration route today. There's no email sending or third-party sync built in yet, and we'd rather be straight about that than imply otherwise.

The CRM that fits the business you actually run