Custom Practice Management Dashboard for Accounting Firm (MVP) — Client & Workflow Tracking

About Us Meraki Finserve is an outsourced accounting and tax firm serving US businesses and individuals (bookkeeping, payroll, tax returns, sales tax, advisory, and compliance work). We currently run operations on spreadsheets, and we've outgrown them. We need a simple, reliable custom dashboard to become our internal source of truth for tracking client work. We have a clear vision for a larger platform down the road, but right now we want a focused MVP that solves our most painful problems — not a heavy, over-engineered system. Build something clean, practical, and easy to extend later. What We Need (MVP Scope) We want a web-based internal dashboard (staff-only, no client-facing portal yet) that handles: Client Management — add/edit/archive clients with basic details (name, entity type, EIN/SSN, owner, status: prospect / active / inactive). Assignments (Engagements) — each client can have multiple work items (e.g., Monthly Bookkeeping, Payroll, Sales Tax, 1120S). Each assignment has: service type, assigned preparer, reviewer, due date, internal due date, priority, and status. Workflow Stages — move each assignment through simple stages (e.g., Not Started → In Progress → Prepared → In Review → Delivered → Completed). Stage list should be easy to configure. Recurring Assignments — auto-create recurring work (monthly, quarterly, annual) so we don't recreate them manually. Dashboard Views — at-a-glance: work due this week, overdue items, work in review, and workload by team member. User Roles — basic role-based access (admin, manager, staff). Nice-to-have (only if it fits budget — otherwise Phase 2): simple time tracking against assignments, internal notes/comments per assignment, and email/deadline notifications. What We're NOT Building Right Now To keep costs and scope realistic, we are not doing: client portal, billing/invoicing, e-signatures, QuickBooks/Xero integrations, or AI features. Please don't quote for these — but we do want the foundation built cleanly so these can be added later. Tech We're open to your recommendation, but we lean toward a modern, low-maintenance, secure stack (e.g., React/Next.js + Node + PostgreSQL, or your justified alternative). Data security matters — we handle sensitive tax information (SSN/EIN), so proper access controls and encryption are required. What to Include in Your Proposal Brief note on similar systems you've built (please share relevant portfolio links / live examples). Your recommended tech stack and why. Rough estimate of timeline and cost for the MVP scope above. How you'd structure it so we can extend it later without a rebuild. Any questions or scope suggestions — we value contractors who think, not just code. We have a detailed requirements document we'll share with shortlisted candidates. Looking for someone reliable, communicative, and pragmatic about scope. Long-term relationship likely for future phases.