AsteraPortal — the back office we built for ourselves
Attendance, payroll, invoicing, quotations, clients, projects and documents in one system instead of five. We built it to run Astera Infotech, we use it every day, and it's available to other businesses that need the same thing.
- INV-1043₹1,26,000
- INV-1039₹74,500due
- INV-1041₹32,750
Five systems that don't talk to each other
The usual arrangement in a growing company: attendance in a spreadsheet, salaries in a second spreadsheet, invoices in accounting software, client details in somebody's inbox, and project status in a WhatsApp group. Each one works. None of them knows about the others.
So the same information gets typed three times, month-end takes days of manual assembly, and nobody can answer "how did last month go" without asking two people and waiting. The cost isn't the software — it's the hours spent moving data between things that should already share it.
- Attendance and payroll live in separate spreadsheets
- Invoices are raised days after the work finishes
- Client history is scattered across inboxes
- Nobody can see project status without asking
- Month-end reporting is assembled by hand
- Leave requests are approved over chat and forgotten
One system, because the data is already related
An employee's attendance feeds their payroll. A client's record holds their quotations, invoices and payments. A project's tasks link to the people doing them. Once those live in one place, most of the manual copying simply stops being necessary.
It's deliberately not a general-purpose platform you configure for six months. It does a defined set of things that a small or medium business actually needs, and it does them on day one.
The honest reason to trust it: we run Astera Infotech on it. Our own payroll, our own invoices, our own client records. Bugs affect us before they affect anyone else.
What's inside
Eight modules, all included — there are no tiers that withhold half the product.
Human resources
The full employee lifecycle, from offer letter to payslip.
- Employee records
- Departments & designations
- Shifts
- Attendance
- Leave management & approvals
- Leave calendar
- Holidays
- Payroll & salary
- Payslips
- Offer letters
Finance & billing
Quote to cash, with the recurring billing most small systems leave out.
- Invoices
- Invoice payments
- Recurring invoices
- Quotations
- Expenses
- Income
- Bank accounts
- Tax rates
Financial reports
The month-end numbers, generated rather than assembled by hand.
- Profit & loss
- Cash flow
- Balance sheet
- Invoice reports
- Expense reports
- Income reports
CRM
Clients and contacts, with their whole financial history attached.
- Client records
- Contacts
- Per-client notes
- Linked quotations & invoices
Projects & tasks
Project tracking with kanban task boards.
- Projects
- Kanban task boards
- Task assignment
- Progress tracking
Documents
Centralised storage, with server-side file type validation rather than trusting extensions.
- Document manager
- Categorised storage
- Validated uploads
Productivity
The everyday tools, so people aren't switching apps to work.
- Calendar
- To-do lists
- Notes
- Internal chat
- Notifications
Administration
Role-based access, an audit trail, and settings that don't need a developer.
- Users & role-based access control
- Employee self-service profiles
- Company & invoice settings
- Email (SMTP) settings
- Security settings
- Activity log
- REST API
Every arrow is work somebody does by hand today
Separate systems don’t just cost licence fees — they cost the hours spent moving the same information between them, and the errors that creep in on the way. These four handoffs are the ones that disappear first.
- AttendancePayrollhours feed salary
- QuotationInvoiceaccepted quote converts
- ClientProjectswork linked to the account
- InvoiceReportsP&L generated, not assembled
Each arrow is a step somebody currently does by hand, twice.
What changes when it's one system
- Data entered once
- Attendance flows into payroll; a quotation becomes an invoice. The copying between systems stops, and so do the transcription errors it caused.
- Invoices go out the same day
- Billing sits next to the work it bills for, so it stops waiting for someone to reconcile two systems first. That shortens how long you wait to get paid.
- Month-end is a page, not a project
- Profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet are generated from the data already in the system rather than assembled by hand.
- Everyone sees their own
- Employees check their attendance, leave balance and payslips themselves, which removes a steady stream of questions from whoever handles HR.
How it's secured
Specifics rather than assurances — each of these is implemented, not aspirational.
- Bcrypt password hashing — passwords are never stored in plain text
- Rate limiting — five failed attempts locks the account for 15 minutes, per IP
- CSRF tokens on every form and AJAX request, validated server-side
- Session IDs regenerated on login; idle sessions expire after 30 minutes
- Auth guard on every page and API endpoint — unauthenticated requests get 401 or a redirect
- Prepared statements with bound parameters on every database query
- All output escaped, so submitted content can't become markup
- Uploads validated by real MIME type detection, not by file extension
- Role-based access control, so people see only what their role allows
- Activity log recording who changed what
Built on
Deliberately unfashionable choices, picked so the system is still maintainable in five years.
- Backend
- PHP 8.1+MySQLi prepared statementsNo ORM
- Database
- MySQL 8+
- Frontend
- Bootstrap 5Chart.jsFullCalendar v6Tabler & Feather icons
- Integrations
- SMTP email via PHPMailerREST APIDocument export
- Quality
- PHPStan level 8PHPUnit44 API endpoints
What it costs
Two ways to buy, and the one thing that isn't included said plainly.
₹1,500per month
All eight modules, updates included. Cancel whenever it stops being useful.
₹25,000one time
Buy it once and run it indefinitely. Works out cheaper than the subscription from about the seventeenth month.
Hosting is not included in either option — the server is yours, so your data and your uptime stay under your control. We'll set it up and tell you what to buy; expect a few hundred rupees a month for a business of typical size.
You provide the hosting
- Runs on standard PHP 8.1+ and MySQL 8+ hosting — no special infrastructure
- Your server, so your data never sits on ours
- We handle installation, configuration and migration
- You can move it to a different host at any time, or hand it to another developer
- Typical cost is a few hundred rupees a month, paid to your host directly
Response within 24 hours
- Bug fixes in the product at no cost
- Help with installation and upgrades
- Guidance on configuration and user roles
- Reachable by phone, email or WhatsApp
Questions about AsteraPortal
Need it to do something it doesn’t? We build custom software too — and since we wrote this, extending it is ordinary work.
Is AsteraPortal actually being used, or is it a demo?
It runs Astera Infotech. Our employee records, attendance, payroll, invoices, quotations, client history and project tracking are all in it, in production. That's the main reason we're comfortable offering it — we find the problems first, because we're the ones using it every day.
Can it be customised for how our business works?
Yes, and that's usually the point of choosing us over an off-the-shelf product. We built it, so we can change it — extra fields, a different approval chain, a report in the format your accountant wants, or a module specific to your industry. Customisation is quoted as development work on top of the product.
Will it work alongside Tally or our existing accounting software?
That's the normal arrangement rather than an exception. AsteraPortal handles operations — attendance, payroll, quotations, invoicing, projects — and the resulting figures can be pushed into whatever your accountant already uses. We don't recommend replacing accounting software that works, and we've said so on our custom software page too.
How many people is it designed for?
It was built for small and medium businesses, which in practice means somewhere between a handful of staff and a few hundred. Below about five people a spreadsheet genuinely is fine and we'd tell you so. Above a few hundred, you're into territory where we'd want to talk about your specific load before promising anything.
What happens to our data if we stop using it?
It's yours and you can export it. We'd rather hand over a database dump and the export files than have anyone feel locked in — the same position we take on code, hosting and ad accounts throughout the rest of our work.
Is our data secure?
The specific measures are listed above rather than summarised as a promise: bcrypt hashing, CSRF tokens, prepared statements on every query, real MIME-type validation on uploads, role-based access, session expiry, and an activity log. If you have a security questionnaire, send it and we'll answer it properly rather than pointing you at a badge.
Book a demo and judge it yourself
The fastest way to judge it is a walkthrough of the modules you'd actually use, with your own scenarios rather than a canned demo. Tell us what your back office looks like today and we'll show you the relevant parts.