The Scope
Ouch runs on one piece of software. The Ouch Portal handles the whole lifecycle of the training business – enquiries, quotes, bookings, course delivery, delegates, certificates and invoicing – and it talks to Microsoft 365, Xero, Stripe and SharePoint to do it. If the Portal stops, the business stops.
When it came to us, nobody could tell us how it worked.
We inherited roughly 68,000 lines of PHP across some 556 files, written without a framework, with no documentation, no automated tests, no deployment pipeline and no managed database structure. Everything anyone knew about how bookings, statuses and workflows actually behaved lived inside the code itself. There was no way to check whether a change had broken something until a member of the team hit it in the middle of their day.
There was a commercial cost running quietly underneath all this, too. When the link to Xero failed partway through, it would try again ten minutes later – and create the same invoice a second time. Then a third. Someone had to spot it and clean it up.
The brief was not “rewrite it”. Ouch needed the Portal working every day, and they needed new things from it. So the challenge was to modernise a large, opaque system while keeping it live and continuing to ship the features the business was asking for.
The Solutions
The work fell into three layers, built in that order.
First, making the Portal knowable. We wrote a full internal reference covering the architecture, the business workflows, the task queue and every external integration. Project guidance now captures the rules and conventions that matter, so good practice survives any one person.
Second, the safety net. The test suite went from nothing to more than 2,400 automated checks – unit tests and full browser-driven end-to-end tests – running on every single release, on a deliberate march towards 80% line coverage. These aren’t decorative: several genuine bugs were caught by the tests and fixed before anyone at Ouch ever saw them. Alongside them, eight-plus automated workflows now handle testing, deployment and releases, and the database structure is managed as code, with a check that fails the build if the live structure drifts from what the code expects. There’s also a forward-compatibility scan, so progression towards moving off the old version of PHP is mapped rather than looming.
Third, everything the business actually asked for. Finance and scheduling features shipped throughout, on the same cadence as the modernisation work – never parked behind it.
The Results
Ten months on from the first commit in October 2025, the Ouch Portal is a documented, continuously tested, continuously released product – and it never went off the air.
Behind that: around 1,460 commits and more than 130 reviewed changes by a very small team, from the first release candidate through to v1.3.7 in August 2026. Anything we find is logged, visible and worked through in priority order, rather than surfacing one surprise at a time.
What that means for Ouch day to day is quieter. Finance stopped chasing duplicate invoices. The busiest screens got faster. Errors get fixed before they get reported. And when the business wants something new from the Portal, it’s a conversation about scheduling, not about risk.
Testimonial
Rejuvenate provide reliable IT solutions for our business including the further development and maintenance of our bespoke customer database, and we have been extremely impressed with the service we receive.
They have taken the time to understand our training business and the way we work, providing practical, tailored solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Their expertise has been particularly valuable in supporting our bespoke customer database, helping us improve efficiency, manage information effectively, and ensure our systems continue to meet the needs of our growing business.
Their team is responsive, knowledgeable and easy to work with. They are always willing to listen, explain things clearly and find solutions when challenges arise. Having a trusted IT partner who understands our business gives us real peace of mind and allows us to focus on delivering a great service to our customers.
We would happily recommend their services to any organisation looking for dependable IT support and bespoke technology solutions.
