We were the customer before we were the vendor

Most case studies on a software company's blog are about somebody else. This one is about us, which makes it either more honest or more self-serving depending on how you feel by the end.

OneBonsai is a deep tech consultancy in Belgium. We build AI and VR systems that run in production: computer vision on live video, digital twins, training simulations for defence, healthcare and industrial clients. Seventy-odd delivered projects across ten industries, for organisations including NVIDIA, Meta, Securitas, Port of Antwerp Bruges and NMBS.

We are good at building software that works in hard environments. We were, until recently, quite bad at running our own back office.

Eight tools, none of them on speaking terms

Twenty-five people on payroll, plus a handful of client guests who could see their own projects and nothing else. And this stack, with what each one cost us every month:

That comes to EUR 1,116 a month. Eight tools, for twenty-five people. Monthly list prices, excluding VAT, which is how our own pricing page quotes too.

The spreadsheet was free, and it was the most expensive item on the list.

The Friday problem

Every Friday afternoon, someone on our team ran the same loop.

Open HubSpot, see which deals closed. Open the invoicing tool, create the invoices, retyping client details that already existed twenty pixels away in another tab. Open the spreadsheet, update the cash-flow forecast by hand. Open Monday, check the work behind those invoices had actually shipped. Then answer Evarest's question, which arrived around five: are we fine.

Three and a half hours.

None of it was hard. All of it was retyping, and every retyping was a chance to put a wrong number somewhere that someone would later trust. We had a person acting as the integration layer between eight systems, and that person's job title did not say integration layer.

"We were drowning in scattered tools before Simplify. Now our finances, our SaaS spend, and our whole team live under one roof."

Evarest Schoofs, CEO, OneBonsai

That quote is on our own homepage, so treat it with the scepticism it deserves. The figures below are the part worth checking.

What we moved, and in what order

Not everything on day one. Anyone describing a big-bang migration is describing a demo.

CRM first. 116 contacts and 96 companies came across by CSV in an afternoon. Deals followed.

Invoicing second, because it sits directly against deals, and this is where the first real change showed up. A won deal becomes a quote, the quote becomes an invoice, and the client details carry themselves across. One click. Nobody retypes a company name that the system already knows.

Cash flow third. The bank feed connected through Ponto, and the forecast started reading actual transactions instead of what someone remembered on a Friday. Each line carries a probability weight, so a maybe-deal does not sit in the runway pretending to be money.

Projects, hiring and performance last, 54 projects over about six weeks, as people gradually stopped opening the old tabs.

The numbers

Cost. EUR 1,116 a month became about EUR 242 a month on the Growth tier. That is EUR 874 saved monthly, EUR 10,488 a year, a 78% reduction.

The Growth number needs one footnote, because we would rather give it than have you find it. Our pricing page lists in dollars: USD 275 a month, up to twenty-five users included. Twenty-five is exactly what we are, so we pay the tier price and not a cent of overage. The euro figure is that dollar price converted on 27 July 2026, and exchange rates being what they are, it will not be precisely EUR 242 by the time you read this.

Our website says "up to 80%." We came in just under our own marketing, which is the correct side of a claim to land on.

Time. The Friday loop went from three and a half hours to about twenty minutes. The software is not clever. The data stopped living in eight places, so there was nothing left to reconcile.

The one that matters most. Evarest can now answer "are we fine" by looking at a screen instead of asking someone to spend an afternoon assembling the answer. For a consultancy running fifty-odd active projects, the difference between knowing your runway and estimating it is not a productivity gain. It is a different way of making decisions.

What did not get better

This is the part that normally gets cut. It is staying in, partly because it is true, and partly because a case study with no friction is an advertisement wearing a lab coat.

Migration took longer than our own homepage promises. The site says most teams are running in under ten minutes. That is honest for a solo founder starting clean. For twenty-five people with years of accumulated structure, it was an afternoon for the core data and roughly six weeks before everyone stopped reaching for the old tools out of habit.

We kept two tools, and we would keep them again. Some things are better handled by software built specifically for them. We would rather say that than claim we replaced everything, because you will find out either way and it is better coming from us.

Statutory accounting still sits with our accountant. Simplify handles quotes, invoices, payments and forecasting, then exports PDF and UBL. It is not accounting software and we have no plans for it to be. If a tool tells you it replaces your invoicing and your accountant, ask it about UBL export and watch what happens.

The honest summary

We built this because we needed it. That is either the best possible reason to trust a piece of software or the most obvious conflict of interest in this article, and both readings are fair.

What we can tell you is the shape of it. Eight tools became three. EUR 1,116 became roughly EUR 242. Three and a half hours became twenty minutes. Six weeks of habits had to change to get there, and two tools survived the cull.

If you are one person with a laptop and no history, consolidating is a quiet afternoon. If you are twenty-five people with years of structure, it is a project worth doing that nobody should sell you as a ten-minute switch.

Run the same exercise on your own stack. Open your billing page, add it up, and see what the total actually is. Then start a free trial at simplifysuite.io, no credit card required, or book a demo and we will go through your list tool by tool, including the ones you should keep.

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Savio Roofthoofd is Founding Commercial Lead at Simplify, built by OneBonsai, a Belgian deep tech consultancy working in AI, VR and simulation for regulated and safety-critical environments. 70+ delivered projects across 10 industries.