Investment Portal — project approval requests

Requests for investment funding used to arrive as forms and stacks of attachments, gathered up by a coordinator in the middle each round. This project moved that path onto the web.

Where it hurt

Every unit filled in its own copy of the form, attached documents, and sent it in. The coordinator rebuilt one table by hand whenever anyone asked for the big picture, and nobody could see where their request stood without walking over to ask.

How it was framed

Two layers. The first is a long branching form, so it became steps validated one at a time instead of a single submit that dumps every error at once. The second: a request is a thing with a state, moving only along permitted paths. The one rule that shaped everything else: a draft must save while incomplete, so completeness gates submitting, not saving.

What actually went wrong

Thai filenames made the file store refuse uploads; its keys take Latin characters only, so stored names became random ids with the real name kept for display. The record of who did what was written fire-and-forget, so when one required value went missing it failed in silence — and only the real records showed that nothing had ever been written.

Worst was the database schema drifting away from the files describing it in code: changes were made through an admin screen and never written back. Realigning them meant replaying every script onto a throwaway database and diffing until nothing differed.

What changed, and the lesson

People who submit see their own status. Reviewers open a request, find its documents in one place, and pull the overview without rebuilding a table.

Treat anything written fire-and-forget as broken until you have checked the real records. A failure that makes no sound never gets reported.