Link to original post in RU

My name is Alexey Stodolnik. I am the leader of NooSchool, a brain development school. I want to share with you the story of how we came to use Totum. But first, a bit about us:

For over 15 years, we have been helping children and adults develop cognitive brain functions such as memory, attention, concentration, and thinking speed. The main goal of NooSchool is comprehensive work on all aspects of a full life - health, creativity, integration into society, and a comfortable psychological state. All of this is connected to the work of our brain. More details at https://noo.school

For several years, process control and tracking key indicators in our company were automated using Google Sheets. With their help, we managed to build a system of interconnected databases. However, during our work, we encountered the following problems:

• Difficulty in managing access rights. It was simply impossible to fully implement proper access rights. The most security-sensitive tables were duplicated for each user, and their import was configured into a single shared table, which served as the basis for all subsequent metrics. In general, it was a small nightmare for the developer. 😊

• Table connections. Despite the convenient functionality for importing tables in Google, it was challenging to use it fully. Keys for linking data from one table to another kept getting disconnected constantly.

• Speed of work. In the beginning, everything was fine, but as the volume grew, closer to the end, the workload increased significantly. We had over 1000 classes per month, each requiring calculations for instructor payments, room rentals, and many other parameters. All of this was consolidated into a single table. Towards the end, it became a nightmare for the accounting department and department managers who calculated the payments. The tables lagged, and it took about 40 minutes to update the data.

• Scalability. This led to another problem - scaling such a solution was extremely difficult. The more users there were, the greater the load, and the more intermediate tables had to be created to support it.

As the leader, I started looking for alternatives to our current tables. After trying several options, I found that most systems were limited in functionality. They didn't even allow us to fully implement the functionality we had in Google Sheets. Moreover, most of them required individual subscriptions for each user. Considering that I planned to connect all the instructors to the system (over 100 people), it would have been a significant expense in our company's budget.

One day, I came across an article about Totum on Habr, which described its functionality. After reading the article and quickly reviewing the documentation, I understood that it was exactly what we needed! It offered complete freedom in implementation, convenient development functionality, a familiar table view for users, flexible access rights settings, and fast performance. Additionally, our project's main database was PostgreSQL with millions of rows, and the ability to directly query it from Totum was a very pleasant addition. Everything aligned perfectly, and we chose Totum as the main system for our project.

Within 3 days, I studied all the documentation and videos on Totum and immediately started development. Within just two months, we were able to transfer all the previously set up logic and data from online documents to the new system. The instructors quickly adapted to the system, and they hardly needed any additional training as everything was intuitive.

After two months of using Totum, a new developer joined NooSchool. Thanks to the user-friendly documentation and video tutorials, they were able to learn the system within 1-2 weeks and get involved in the process. The ease of adoption is also one of the undeniable advantages of Totum, and I'm glad we chose it.

We express our great respect and appreciation for your work and prompt technical support! And even if you suddenly find a bug or defect (which happens quite rarely), the developers of the system are always promptly involved in the process and fix everything very quickly. Our whole team hopes that Totum will also steadily develop and add new features!

P.S. We've even started thinking about commercial implementation of Totum for other companies' business processes digitization. It's really good, and it will bring a lot of benefits.

Translated by GPTChat