A Contractor built a reconciliation tool for two systems that should agree

“We're too small to get hacked.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Honestly? Because the vendor said it could be ready in Q1, assuming requirements do not change. Already exported 83,472 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Petra, a working student

Build time:

6 evenings

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

an API that returns CSV

Authentication:

the guest Wi-Fi password is also the admin password

Deployment:

deployed to staging, which customers are now using

Responsible:

the person sitting closest to the printer

Documentation:

an Excel tab called Instructions

Security situation:

CSRF protection was temporarily disabled

Future disaster:

It will become part of the company's "digital core" slide deck.

Age: 23 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 23 days ago · original builder left 42 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €157k per year, 4 departments depend on it, the builder has left.