AZ Consulting GmbH CRM

AZ Consulting GmbH runs three separate practice areas under one roof — MPU assessments, Verfahrensbeistand work (child advocacy and family-court representation, including Jugendamt coordination), and sworn translations. Each practice has its own workflows, documents, and deadlines. Four internal users (3 employees + 1 manager) needed a platform that reflected those differences instead of forcing a single generic shape onto all three.

The legacy system had been in use for years, but it no longer matched daily work. Searching for a client took multiple clicks where a typed query would have been enough. Court dates lived apart from case files. Translator assignments lived in spreadsheets. Audit trails were missing or too noisy to use reliably. The brief was to build a CRM around how those four users work — and migrate existing clients, cases, and documents into it.

• One platform for three different practices, side by side
• A migration path designed to avoid disrupting active client cases
• Search and filters that match how staff look for records
• Automated backups with status visible in the UI
• An audit trail scoped per workflow — not one tangled global event log

The new CRM had to launch with existing clients, cases, and documents already migrated — without running parallel systems or catching up later. Migration was treated as a core feature: planned and verified end-to-end before go-live.

1. W1

   Mapping how the team works

   Before writing code, I mapped daily work with the four internal users (3 employees + 1 manager) — how MPU files flow, what makes a court case different from a translation job, and where the legacy system slowed them down. The new data model was designed around those workflows, not around the database being replaced.

2. W2

   Developing the platform, moving the data

   Module by module, the platform was built: client records, case files, documents, calendar, search. In parallel, the migration pipeline was rehearsed against test copies of the old database until record counts matched, documents were re-linked, and financial history was reconciled against the legacy totals.

3. W3

   Weekend cutover and Monday go-live

   Cutover ran over a weekend. By Monday morning, more than 1,000 client records and 20,000+ documents (around 19 GB) were in the new system — with the legacy system kept read-only for a week as a fallback. After handover, the 4 internal users continued client work in the new CRM.

The dashboard is the daily entry point: open work, appointments, and selected financial indicators in one place — filtered by role so staff see what they need for operations without exposing executive-only figures.

Medical-psychological assessments are paperwork-heavy and deadline-sensitive. A case can carry weeks of correspondence, expert reports, scheduling, and document dependencies. The MPU module keeps related material under a single client view so documents and deadlines are easier to track together.

1 Case data, documents, dates, and the audit trail live in one module view.

Verfahrensbeistand work depends on careful coordination — between the child whose interests are represented, the parents on each side, the Jugendamt (Youth Welfare Office), and the family court. The VB & Gericht module gives the team a structured view of active mandates and the parties involved.

Not every mandate needs MPU stages or court party graphs. Allgemeine Beratung keeps a separate, thinner dossier type for general consulting work — with soft-delete so closed files can be removed from daily lists without hard-erasing history.

Translation work has its own workflow: external sworn translators, language pairs, certified documents, billing per page. The Übersetzungen module is built around that model instead of forcing it into a generic case shape.

Court interpreting is handled as its own domain — not folded into sworn translations. Interpreter dossiers track court associations, hearing schedules, and a dedicated document vault for that workflow.

Beyond case-linked appointments, the sidebar module Interne Planung covers operational week planning: a KW week grid, internal spreadsheet-style boards, and token-gated iCal/Webcal feeds for external calendar apps.

Finding records quickly and seeing who changed what were treated as core features, not late add-ons.

• Global search across clients, cases, documents, calendar entries, and translator records — ranked by relevance, with the module label attached to each hit.
• Contextual filters per module — tables use filter sets built around how that practice works, rather than one generic search box for everything.
• Saved views for recurring queries — open MPU files, this-week court dates, undelivered translations — so common filters do not have to be rebuilt each morning.
• Module-scoped audit trails: actions are logged inside the module they belong to, so changes on a specific MPU case can be reviewed without wading through unrelated events.
• Append-only audit log — entries are not edited in place; each change records user, IP, and what changed.

AZ-Chat is the internal messaging channel for the four users. It runs on Socket.io inside the authenticated app and is kept strictly separate from client dossier files and from the AI assist path.

Billing is integrated into the case workflow. Invoices, tax modes, payments, and dossier balances share one financial path — with GoBD-oriented rules in both the UI and the API. The same platform also includes a dossier AI assistant with human-in-the-loop write-back. Cashbook-style POS (Z-Bon) is intentionally out of scope for this phase.

1 One financial path per dossier: locked invoices, conditional tax footnotes, and payments that update the balance.

Administrative controls sit in a dedicated sidebar area: user accounts, cross-domain audit logs, company letterhead for PDFs, and legal-text sync with the public marketing site.

Alongside the practice modules: data modeling, document handling, DSGVO-oriented file access, and a server-side AI assist path with human-in-the-loop write-back.

The CRM handles sensitive client data, court documents, and MPU files. Security was built into the architecture — with role-based access control, protected document access, server-side validation, and controlled interfaces — rather than added as an afterthought.