Ask what happens before anything is built
The answer you want is some version of “we map how you work and you sign it off”. If the first deliverable is configuration rather than a written record of how you work, you are paying someone to guess and then paying again to correct the guess.
Ask who owns it at the end
Work built in your own portal, under your own accounts, is yours. Anything running on the consultant’s systems is theirs, and you should know which parts are which before you start rather than at the point you want to leave.
Neither model is wrong. A service that runs on their infrastructure is often the right answer. What matters is that nobody is vague about which is which.
Ask how they test
“We tested it” is not an answer. Ask what they tested it against. The only test that means anything is your own recent jobs run end to end, with a pass or fail written down, before it goes live.
Ask what the handover looks like
- Is there a runbook, or just a call?
- Does it say who owns what after they leave?
- Does it say what to do first when something breaks?
- Can your team follow it without ringing them?
The red flags
- A quote before a conversation. Nobody can price this off a form.
- Licences bundled into the build fee. You should see what the software costs and what the work costs, separately.
- A demo portal that looks nothing like your business. Ask to see something built for someone in your trade.
- No mention of data. If cleaning is not in the plan, the build is going on top of a mess.
- Lock-in by obscurity. Undocumented naming and no written record is a retention strategy, not an oversight.
The cheapest build is the one you do not have to pay someone else to unpick in a year.
What good looks like
A plan you can read in plain English, a fixed sequence, three points where you sign something off, and documentation you keep. If you get those four, the rest is mostly detail.
That is how we run it, and it is written up in full on how it works.