Operations and citizen services platform for a municipality
A full-stack administration platform for a municipality covering permits, fees, financial tracking, citizen engagement and granular role-based access control across dozens of internal departments.
The challenge
A regional municipality was running its operations across a patchwork of aging desktop applications, spreadsheets and department-specific databases. Every permit, fee and citizen request moved between departments on paper or by email. Financial reconciliation took weeks. Access control was "whoever asked for a login got a login", which made every audit a scramble.
They wanted one platform to run the municipality on: permits, fees, accounting, citizen-facing services, and department-level workflow — all with the kind of role-based access control a regulator or internal audit team could actually verify.
Our approach
- Started with a months-long discovery phase mapping every department's existing workflow and data. No two departments did the same thing the same way.
- Built the platform on Laravel with Filament as the administrative layer, giving us enterprise-grade CRUD, forms, tables and permissions without reinventing any of it.
- Designed a granular permission model with per-department, per-resource, per-action controls that map directly onto the municipality's real org chart.
- Implemented audit logging for every financial transaction and every permission change, with read-only export for the internal audit team.
- Delivered in rolling waves — one department at a time — so the platform was earning its keep before the whole rollout was finished.
Architecture highlights
- Laravel 12 on PHP 8.3
- Filament as the admin framework, extended with custom resources and actions
- PostgreSQL with role-based row-level access
- Structured audit log for financial and administrative actions
- Modular module design so new departments can be onboarded without touching existing code
Outcome
- Replaced a decade of disconnected internal tools with one platform covering permits, fees, accounting and citizen services
- Department rollout completed in phased waves so operations were never blocked
- Granular RBAC verifiable by the municipality's internal audit function
- Financial reconciliation compressed from weeks to routine reporting
Let's build something that ships.
Tell us about your project. A senior engineer will reply within one business day, no pitches, no forms-before-forms.