Babià One

More than ten years building the operating system of a business consultancy

Clients, work, payroll, timekeeping, documents and invoicing all in one platform, where each person sees exactly what they are responsible for.

Gestoría Babià has been managing its operations with Babià One since 2013, the platform developed by Mecexis for them, which has grown alongside the firm. Today, it's the hub for client relationships, team work, payroll, time tracking, documents, signatures, and, since 2026, complete invoicing with Veri*factu. A decade later, it's still in daily production. And it's still under development.

A business consultancy is many companies at once.

Each client brings their file, their employees, their deadlines, and their documents

A consultancy manages the tax and labor affairs of others. Each client company is a small world: tax data, contracted services, employees with their payslips and time records, invoices, and documents that come and go. And around each world are people who need to see different things. The manager wants to consult the company's invoices and the payslips of their staff; the employee, their payslip and timesheets; the consultancy team needs to see everything.

Gestoría Babià currently supports more than 300 active companies, and more than 800 have passed through Babià One since 2013. When Mecexis started working with them in 2013, that reality was divided as in almost all offices in the sector: email to talk to the client, shared folders for documents, a spreadsheet to know what is charged to whom, a separate billing program and a time clock app that knew nothing about the rest.

They weren't looking for just another portal. They were looking for a partner who understood how a business consultancy works and would build with them, piece by piece and over years, the system that the market didn't offer.

The problem wasn't one tool, it was five tools that weren't speaking to each other.

Billing, document management, work control, and customer service shouldn't be four separate jobs.

Each piece of information is entered multiple times. A customer emails asking where their invoice is, and someone finds it, attaches it, and sends it. When an employee wants to know their monthly hours, they call. None of this is an isolated incident: it's the daily cost of an operation fragmented into pieces.

Billing was the clearest example. Until recently, the accounting firm's invoices were generated in a separate program, and the team manually uploaded them, client by client and month by month, to the shared cloud folder so that each company could view them on their portal. It worked, but every month it was the same repetitive task, and the system didn't know what service each client had contracted or at what price: it only saw a PDF.

In addition to fragmentation, two pressures were constantly growing. First, regulations: mandatory time tracking and, later, Veri*factu transformed what was previously a best practice into a legal requirement. Gestoría Babià saw this coming and decided to turn it into a selling point: offering its clients time tracking and access to their employee portal as part of their service, something other firms didn't provide. Second, the sensitivity of the data: a business consultancy handles IBANs, tax identification numbers, payroll, and tax documents for third parties, and any access, download, or correction must be accountable afterward.

The challenge was to connect the entire journey of a management service, from defining what is provided to each client to collecting payment, without the platform oversimplifying a reality that is not simple.

All your administrative needs in one place

Babià One organizes all activity around a simple idea: each client has a profile, and everything else is linked to it. This includes individuals and companies, groups, occasional clients, employees, tax information, address, payment method, and IBAN. From there, services, contracts, tasks, invoices, and documents share a common context, and no one ever enters the same information twice.

One portal for each company and another for each employee

Each client's manager logs into their portal and finds the accounting firm's invoices, employee payroll, activity logs, communications, signature requests, and a shared cloud-based document repository with Gestoría Babià where both parties upload and retrieve files related to their relationship. Each employee has their own access point, and from there they clock in, view their time records, and download their payslips. That's all. Neither the company sees the accounting firm's information, nor do the employees see the company's.
Work, payroll, and signings in the same flow

Lists, tasks, responsible parties, deadlines, comments, and recorded time organize the team's day and are linked to the client and the billed service. Payroll is imported nightly from the office files, saving a history of every change and notifying the client. Employees clock in and out using their mobile phones with geolocation validated by work center, and any correction leaves a trace: the history is immutable.
From contract to payment without leaving the platform

The final piece, and the one that completed the circle. The catalog defines the services, both recurring and one-off, with their price, VAT, and income tax. Contracts establish the terms for each client. And every month, an automated process generates the items to be invoiced, even including payroll for the period when the service is billed per employee. From there, Babià One groups items into quotes, issues invoices and credit notes with serial numbering, sends each record to Veri*factu, and collects payments both online via Stripe and through SEPA bank transfers. Where before there was a PDF uploaded manually each month, now there's a continuous flow of work completed and money deposited into the account.
What goes on behind the scenes while the team works

Billable items are automatically generated each month. A new document in the cloud notifies the client the following day. Recurring communications are sent to client groups at the set frequency. Submissions to Veri*factu are retried when the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT) doesn't respond. And every Friday, the team receives a summary of tasks and hours for the week without anyone having to prepare it.
Always know what happened, who did it, and when

Every login, download, export, and access to sensitive data is recorded in a cryptographically chained, immutable log, and the main models maintain their change history. Automation eliminates repetitive work; traceability ensures that eliminating work doesn't mean losing control.

Artificial intelligence for a consultancy: reading, transcribing and summarizing

The AI handles the documents and recordings; the team retains judgment

Artificial intelligence at Babià One comes into play where it truly saves typing. When registering a client, the team uploads their ID and tax documents, and an AI model (Gemini) extracts their name, tax ID, address, or company name to pre-fill the form. The person reviews and saves: what used to be a bit of data copying becomes a simple verification.

On a daily basis, a meeting or call with a client is recorded directly from the browser, transcribed, and automatically summarized into a reviewable activity, including attendees, date, tasks, and internal notes. No one takes minutes or transcribes them afterward.

Behind this lies an engineering decision: the AI services are interchangeable by configuration (Gemini or Gladia for transcription, Gemini for extraction and summarization), with a development mode that doesn't make any external calls. This way, the firm isn't tied to a single provider, and no testing touches real data. The AI reads and summarizes; the Gestoría Babià team retains its expertise and client relationships. It's the same principle we apply to all our projects: technology handles the repetitive work, and people make the decisions.

More than ten years in production without having to start from scratch.

Custom software that doesn't age is software that is never stopped being built.

We've seen proprietary systems that were pioneering in their day and ended up becoming a burden because no one touched them for twenty years. Babià One avoids that fate in the only way possible: by evolving in short cycles, with each functionality defined and documented before being built and a change log for each version, without ever interrupting the firm's activity.

The platform is built with Django and server-side rendering, using Pug, SASS, HTML, and Alpine.js for a streamlined interface without a heavy frontend. It's multilingual and a progressive web app: the team uses it on their desktops, and clients and employees install it on their mobile devices like any other app. The management screens rely on Mecexis's proprietary system for lists, filters, and forms, which we refine on a project-by-project basis.

Under the hood, Docker runs on Hetzner with PostgreSQL, Redis, and Syncthing for cloud document management, along with workers in separate queues for general tasks, PDFs, remittances, and Veri*factu. Document generation, bank statements, submissions to the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT), AI-powered data extraction, and transcriptions all run in the background: while the system works, people continue working. Deployment is continuous, based on tags in GitHub Actions.

One architectural decision deserves special mention: the billing system lives in an isolated module, with its contacts, invoices, and Veri*factu, independent of the rest of the project and ready to be reused in other Mecexis products. The hardest part to build is built only once.

Babià One in numbers

More than a decade of trust and continuous evolution together with Gestoría Babià.

+800
Managed clients
+10
Connected modules
2013
First version

A foundation to keep adding

Each new need falls into the same thread.

Babià One is modular by design: services, contracts, tasks, invoicing, payroll, documents, communications, and signatures all share the same customer base and permissions. This allows for the continued addition of automations and capabilities without the operation becoming fragmented again, which was the initial problem.

And not just for Gestoría Babià: components like the invoicing module are already ready to be integrated into other Mecexis products. More than ten years of a custom project have not only solved the management problems of one firm, but have also yielded features that will be useful for future projects.