Agileworkforce — United Kingdom
Freelance Marketplace Platform for UK Chartered Accountants
- Product pod + senior designer
- Team
- Build → ongoing iteration
- Engagement length
- Laravel · React · PostgreSQL · Stripe
- Tech stack
- Live in production
- Status
Project details
The Challenge
Agileworkforce set out to solve a specific structural problem in the UK accounting industry: practices and firms regularly need qualified, vetted accountants for short-term work — busy season, parental leave cover, one-off projects — and qualified accountants increasingly want flexible, project-based engagements rather than full-time roles. The two sides existed in a fragmented market connected by phone calls, recruiter introductions, and LinkedIn. There was no neutral platform built around the actual workflow of chartered-accountant engagements.
The brief was to build that platform end-to-end. Vetted freelance accountant profiles on one side, firm-posted engagements on the other, matching, contracting, timesheets and payments in between — with the regulatory texture of the UK accounting industry handled correctly. A marketplace where the trust layer was credible enough that a firm would actually let a freelance accountant near a client file.
Our Approach
We took this on as an end-to-end product build — from the early-stage product discovery work through architecture, build, launch, and into the iteration phase post-launch. A senior product designer and a small engineering pod from our side worked alongside the Agileworkforce founders, with the founders owning product direction and our team owning delivery.
The platform is a Laravel + Inertia application with a two-sided model:
- Accountant side — verified profile (ACA / ACCA / CIMA membership checks, professional indemnity confirmation, references), capability tags (audit, tax, corporate finance, advisory specialisms), availability calendar, and engagement history.
- Firm side — engagement posting with structured scope (specialism, seniority, duration, on-site vs remote), shortlisting, interview scheduling, and contract issuance.
- Matching — engagement-to-accountant matching driven by capability fit, availability, and prior-engagement signal, with human review of the proposed shortlist before it goes to the firm.
- Contracting & payments — engagement contracts generated against a standard template, signed in-platform, with timesheet capture and payment runs into the accountants and from the firms.
The trust layer was where we spent disproportionate design effort. A chartered accountant working briefly inside a firm's client file is a sensitive arrangement; the platform's verification, contracting and audit-trail features are designed to be credible to the partners actually signing off on the engagement. That meant explicit confidentiality language baked into the standard contract, granular permission scopes on what an engaged accountant can see in the firm workspace, and full audit-log retention on every meaningful action.
Stack: Laravel · PHP 8 · Inertia · React · PostgreSQL · Stripe Connect, with email and document workflows orchestrated through queue workers and a Filament-powered operations admin for the Agileworkforce team to manage verification and dispute handling.
The Outcome
The platform has launched and is operating as the trust-and-workflow layer between vetted freelance chartered accountants and the UK firms engaging them. Both sides of the marketplace are live, with verified accountants on the supply side and firms posting engagements on the demand side, and the contracting-and-payments rail running end-to-end through the platform.
Our engagement continues into the post-launch iteration phase — refining matching quality, extending the engagement types the platform supports, and building out the operations tooling the Agileworkforce team needs as the marketplace scales. The product roadmap is jointly owned, and the engineering team operates as Agileworkforce's de-facto build function.
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