Nine years of knowledge, trapped in four systems.

Four systems, none of them talking.

Freebird has placed creative freelancers in Paris since 2017. By 2026, four people were carrying a business that had outgrown its software. The engagement started with an audit to put numbers on the problem.

What it found:

• Eight to twelve hours a week lost to double entry and manual tasks.
• Every mission meant at least eight manual entries across four systems.
• One person at a time could edit a mission file. MBLD locks records, and the team is four.
• No automation anywhere. No reminders, no workflows, no alerts.
• Agrolog ran on one local Windows machine. No mobile, no remote access.
• Bank reconciliation took three manual steps: check CIC, write a note, key it into Agrolog.
• 1,224 portfolio folders sat in Google Drive, unlinked to any mission or talent record.
• GDPR exposure. No consent mechanism, no retention policy.

Build around what works. Replace only what doesn't.

The easy recommendation was a clean slate. It would have been wrong. Behind MBLD sat 1,781 freelancers, 886 companies and nine years of history, and Agrolog handled invoicing correctly.

So the brief: carry the data forward intact, keep what earns its place, and remove the manual work in between. Audit findings were ranked by time recovered against effort to fix, and the build followed that order.

Freebird's value isn't in its tools. It's in the intimate knowledge of every talent, in the responsiveness, in the human relationship cultivated since 2017. The point of this engagement is to give that time back. From the engagement proposal, April 2026

A business platform shaped around the actual work.

• A systems audit that put hard numbers on the old setup. The figures above are its findings.
• One platform in place of four systems, with mission records the whole team can open at once.
• Full data migration. 1,781 freelancers, 886 companies, 5,726 missions and nine years of history, carried across without loss.
• Portfolio files reconnected to the mission and talent records they belong to.
• Automation for reminders, workflows and alerts. That layer didn't exist before.
• Invoicing integration, ending the manual re-entry behind every bill.
• GDPR foundations: consent capture and a defined retention policy.
• A feedback loop so the team raises issues from inside the app and watches them get fixed.

Four systems down to one.

The full dataset has made the trip: 1,781 freelancers, 886 companies and 5,726 missions, nine years of history in one place, with around a thousand freelancer records linked to their portfolio folders at last. The team has been checking its own data in the live platform since mid-October.

Search, missions and the whole money chain, from quote to invoice to Pennylane, switch over together. Before that: four full cutover rehearsals, and a restore drill that brought the entire platform back in 89 seconds with every file intact.

From then on, the frictions the audit measured are gone by design. No single-user lock on mission files. No triple-keyed bank entries. Reminders and alerts run themselves. The hours that went into retyping go back where Freebird's value has always been: the relationships.