De Leasebaas
A custom CRM for De Leasebaas, including a customer login
De Leasebaas brokers vehicle leases and manages fleets. Customer records, fleets and quote requests lived in spreadsheets and the mailbox. Salesforce was seriously considered; it became a custom application, with fleet management, a login for every customer and a quoting process that asks all leasing companies at the same time.
About De Leasebaas
De Leasebaas is an independent intermediary for operational lease, short lease, bicycle lease, mobility budgets and fleet management. No fleet of its own and no ties to a single leasing company: the value is in the comparison.
The work runs through a network of partners. Leasing companies, car dealers, short-lease and charging-point suppliers, each with their own brand specialisms and their own agreements. That network lived in people's heads and in scattered files.
The challenge
Every customer's fleet sat in a spreadsheet. Expiring contracts only surfaced when somebody went looking, while that is exactly the moment an intermediary adds value: well before the end date, not after it.
For a quote request, the same car with the same conditions went out by hand to five leasing companies. The answers came back as PDFs in the mailbox, in five different layouts, and were compared manually. That took hours, and a deviating excess or excess-mileage rate is easily missed.
Why it did not become Salesforce
Salesforce was part of the assessment, as it is in every project. Functionally it fits: customers, prospects, partners and a quoting process are not exotic requirements.
The sums came out differently. De Leasebaas runs a small team, but wanted to give every customer their own login for the fleet. In a package you pay for those external users separately, on top of the licences for your own team and on top of the configuration. Over five years that ran higher than building and maintaining.
On top of that, the distinctive part, asking all leasing companies at once and comparing what comes back, would have been custom work in any package. In that case you may as well build it properly from the start.
Read how we weigh that upThe approach
The CRM runs behind a login on the same domain as the website. Customers, prospects, partners and fleets sit in one system, with the quoting process built around it.
One request covers one car with one set of conditions, and goes out word for word identical to every selected company. That is precisely what makes the responses comparable.
What was built?
The parts that carry the system:
Customers, prospects and partners
Prospects move through a pipeline from new to won or lost, and become a customer when the status is switched. Notes, appointments, status changes and signals all land in one activity log per company.
Fleet with expiry alerts
Every vehicle per customer, with registration, contract number, term, mileage and driver. Sorted by end date, amber within 120 days and red within 60. The dashboard opens with the contracts that are expiring.
A login for every customer
Customers log in and see their own fleet. That boundary sits in the database rather than in the screen: even someone addressing the API directly cannot reach another customer's fleet.
Asking every company at once
Tick who takes part, and everybody receives the same email with the same reference. Each company replies to its own address, so a response finds its way back to the right request automatically.
Quotes read out automatically
The PDF and the message body are read for monthly rate, excess and shortfall mileage rates, included components, excess, replacement transport, roadside assistance and delivery time. If one document offers several variants, those become several rows.
Comparing and awarding
The criteria line up underneath each other, with the best value marked per row. An extracted amount is a proposal: every value can be corrected by hand and the correction wins. The award is recorded with its reasoning in the customer file.
Requests to partners
The partner page carries a request form that lands straight in the leasing company's mailbox, with the requester as the reply address. Every request is logged.
The result
What changed in practice:
- Expiring contracts surface by themselves instead of having to be looked up
- A request to five companies takes one form instead of five emails
- Quotes can be read side by side, even when they arrive in five different layouts
- Customers always have their own fleet at hand, without a file doing the rounds
- Agreements with partners sit in one place instead of in someone's head
- No licence per user, so an extra customer costs nothing extra
Why CRM Force
Where this case shows how we work:
- Do the sums first, then choose: licences and build costs over the same period, side by side
- Boundaries in the database, so they can be tested and cannot be bypassed
- Automatic extraction as a proposal, never as the truth; the user corrects it
- Built on Next.js, Supabase and Vercel, with the source code held by the client
- One team for the build and for the design of the process
Wondering whether custom works out cheaper for you?
We put the licence cost of a package and the build cost of custom software side by side over the same period. If the package comes out better, we say so.