Operational & Revenue Intelligence Platform for Fine Art Restoration
The Problem
Fine art restoration businesses operate at the intersection of craftsmanship, insurance, sales pipelines, and client trust. The client faced growing challenges managing restoration projects and insurance-linked deals, tracking communications across email, calls, and notes, monitoring revenue and pipeline health, and scaling operations without losing visibility or control.
Existing tools were fragmented and lacked domain-specific insight. Leadership had no single place to understand what was happening across the business at any given moment.
The platform needed to unify sales intelligence, project management, and communication tracking into one system — without disrupting the daily workflows of a highly specialized restoration team.
Context
Art restoration is a niche industry where each project involves high-value assets, insurance coordination, detailed client communication, and long timelines. Off-the-shelf CRMs and project management tools don't account for the domain's unique workflow: deals tied to insurance claims, projects spanning months of delicate physical work, and revenue that depends on pipeline stages invisible to generic tools.
The client needed something purpose-built — a platform that understood their business model and surfaced the right information to the right people at the right time.
Approach
Centralized Dashboard & Intelligence
We built a role-based dashboard that provides a real-time view of the entire business. Deal and project lifecycle tracking, pipeline and stage visibility, revenue breakdowns by client type, priority and risk identification, and individual and team-level performance views — all accessible at a glance. Leadership can immediately see what's happening, what's at risk, and what needs attention.
Communication & Data Automation
To reduce manual effort and data loss, the platform integrates deeply with existing communication tools. Email ingestion and summarization, call recording and transcript association, activity timelines linked to each deal, and automated syncing from external systems like CRM pipelines — all flow into a single source of truth for every restoration project, from first contact to completion.
Ingesting and normalizing data from multiple external sources — email providers, call recording services, and legacy CRM systems — required robust error handling and deduplication logic to maintain a reliable activity timeline.
Security & Role-Based Access
Given the sensitivity of client data and high-value asset information, we implemented secure JWT-based authentication with granular role-based access controls. Different team members see exactly what they need — leadership gets full revenue analytics, while project managers focus on their active restorations.
Architecture
The platform was engineered for reliability, security, and long-term scalability:
- Frontend: Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript with component-driven dashboards and real-time data visualization
- Backend: FastAPI (Python) with a hybrid REST + GraphQL architecture for flexible data access
- Database: PostgreSQL with strong relational modeling for complex business entities
- Integrations: External CRM synchronization, email and call data ingestion, background schedulers and cron jobs
- Infrastructure: Dockerized services with Traefik, production-grade deployment with automated backups
Results
The platform delivered a production-ready operational intelligence system that unified sales, restoration projects, and communications into a single view. Leadership gained immediate visibility into revenue and pipeline health, while the team reduced operational overhead through automated data ingestion and activity tracking. The architecture was built to scale, ready for new integrations and expansion as the business grows.
Next Steps
The client is expanding the platform to incorporate additional data sources, including vendor management and supply chain tracking for restoration materials. The team is also exploring predictive analytics to forecast pipeline revenue and flag at-risk deals before they stall.