Custom apps for organisations operating worldwide.

An organisation operating within the Netherlands can get a long way with standard ERP, CRM and HR packages. However, as soon as you open a second site in Germany, enter a joint venture in Singapore, or ship daily consignments to Brazil, India and the US via Schiphol cargo, every off-the-shelf system breaks in a number of predictable places. Multi-currency reporting falters as soon as you need quarterly consolidation with intercompany transactions, multi-language support stays limited to a handful of interface languages and becomes unusable in countries with right-to-left scripts, and cross-border data transfers come under pressure from the GDPR, the CCPA, the LGPD and POPIA all at once — and that is only the privacy side.

A Dutch multinational that must for the first time genuinely comply with the CSRD and with the US SEC climate disclosure rules sees its ESG team quadruple within a few months. A scale-up with customers in seven countries discovers that VAT, sales tax, GST and VAT each have their own rules, and that the standard expense tool forces employees in Tokyo to scan yen receipts in an interface that only rounds to euro figures. And an exporter of high-tech machinery — think semiconductor suppliers in the ASML chain — faces export control rules (DUL), customs UCC codes, HS classifications and sanctions lists that differ for every destination country, and which no standard package can be made to work with without custom development.

In practice, global businesses respond with a patchwork: SAP or Oracle for the financial core, Workday or SuccessFactors for HR, Salesforce for customer contact, a bespoke middleware layer in Java or .NET, and alongside that a growing number of point solutions per region. The core functionality works, but every new region means a new subproject, every compliance change means a new migration, and every attempt to get management information from three continents into one view ends in a Power BI report that is out of date again after a quarter.

A custom app solves that differently: your business logic sits at the centre, and the region-specific exceptions sit around it as configuration. Instead of six separate SaaS tools, an employee in São Paulo, Rotterdam, Singapore and San Francisco gets the same core experience with region-adapted data. We build that layer on top of Appfront's app service and connect it to your existing ERP, CRM and HR stack. For companies that deliver their own multi-region platform to international clients, we draw on our multi-tenant platform approach. For the B2B delivery context, covering client onboarding, contract flows and SLAs per region, we align with the logic of a custom B2B app.

The world of global business is broader than a single type of client, and that shows in the kinds of apps we build. For one company, the centrepiece is a multi-currency and multi-language customer portal where clients in fifteen countries log in at the same time, see their invoices in local currency, read contracts in their own language and handle support requests in their own time zone. Such a portal calls for ICU MessageFormat as the basis for i18n, Right-to-Left support for Arabic, Hebrew and Persian users, an exchange-rate pipeline (Open Exchange Rates or a feed from a central bank), and a payment layer that connects smoothly to Mollie or Stripe for European countries, to Adyen and local schemes for APAC, and to ACH and wires for the US.

For another group of clients, the need is an employee app for global teams: one environment in which an employee in Rotterdam, a production worker in Poland, a sales representative in Brazil and an engineer in Bangalore all get the same core experience, with payslips in the right language and currency, leave requests that follow local labour rules, and a training tracker with country-specific content. Under the hood, that means role configuration per country, a design system that works across ten languages without breaking the pixel grids, and a notification layer that takes regional religious holidays into account. For businesses serving international clients through their own tenant architecture, the same approach builds on our multi-tenant platform approach.

A third category is cross-border compliance dashboards, which have become considerably more demanding in recent years. A Dutch listed company faces CSRD for its EU reporting, SFDR for financial products making sustainability claims, and the EU Taxonomy for classifying its activities, and in the same cycle it may also need an SEC reconciliation if it is listed in the US. We don't build these dashboards as after-the-fact reports. Instead, we build a hands-on environment in which ESG data is pulled at transaction and invoice level, and in which the audit trail for each disclosure can be traced back to an individual purchase invoice or HR change. The foundations come directly from our CSRD/ESG reporting software approach.

For exporters and logistics organisations, we more often build supply-chain track-and-trace and customs flows: shipments from the Dutch warehouse or the Schiphol cargo hub can be tracked all the way to their final destination, with automatic HS code classification, integrations with the EU Customs Single Window and local customs APIs, and sanctions list screening at order confirmation. For high-tech exporters in the semiconductor and machinery supply chain, export control is added on top: classification under the Dual-Use Regulation, list assessment per supplier country and end-use declarations. Where compliance complexity runs deeper, this often connects to an enterprise software project as a reference architecture.

A fifth group of apps centres on expense management, travel flows and client onboarding for international travel and cross-border KYC/KYB. Employees in São Paulo, Tokyo or Lagos scan local receipts, the system allocates them to the correct sub-unit, links them to the local corporate card, and forwards them to group accounting, where the amount is converted at the exchange rate on the day of the transaction. Client onboarding for international B2B service providers runs on KYC and KYB, with UBO rules per jurisdiction, sanctions screening against EU, US and UN lists, and contract flows that account for local jurisdictional provisions and language variants. For the B2B side of such apps, we often start from our page on building a B2B app.

The common thread: the software is built for the reality of operating worldwide, rather than exporting a Dutch product with a few extra languages bolted on. We build vendor-independent — a future IT partner of your group or a successor in the CIO seat can take over the code, data and hosting without Appfront becoming indispensable through tokens, certificates or credentials. An international business should not be locked into a tool the moment it makes an acquisition, closes a site or its reporting regime fundamentally changes.