ContextWho uses it and for what
Route2Uni helps students from Nepal apply to universities in the UK. Each student file moves through the same stages: enquiry, application, offer, Pre-CAS interview, CAS and visa. Counsellors, the admissions team, the UK team and partner agents all touch the same file at different points.
The CRM is where all of that happens. More than 50 staff use it every day, and it connects to 30+ university partner portals.
The problemWhat the system has to get right
In student recruitment, a missed step is expensive. A document that is not uploaded before a CAS deadline, or a visa date nobody noticed, can cost a student their intake. So the CRM has three jobs:
- Show where every student is, so nothing waits in someone’s inbox.
- Give each person the right access: counsellors, managers, the UK team and outside partners see different things.
- Answer management questions without spreadsheets: how many offers this intake, which partner sends the most students, where files get stuck.
As the team and the number of partners grew, the first version reached its limits, which is why it is now being rebuilt.
My roleWhat I did
I built the first version on my own while working as IT Officer for the UK and Nepal teams, and ran CRM operations for the UK team across its university partners. Since becoming Head of IT in February 2026 I lead the rebuild as technical lead: architecture, data model, security, the delivery plan, and a good share of the code.
DecisionsKey decisions and why
The pipeline uses the same names the team already uses (offer, Pre-CAS, CAS, visa), so nobody has to learn a new vocabulary and reports read the way managers talk.
Staff and partners get role-based access, and multi-factor sign-in is required. This brought the team to 100% compliance with our internal security standard.
Dashboards read straight from the CRM instead of from exported sheets. That cut manual reporting work by about 40%.
Students, applications, universities, intakes and partners are tightly linked records. PostgreSQL with Prisma gives a typed schema, real constraints and safe migrations as the model grows.
Partner syncs, bulk emails and report generation run on Redis and BullMQ queues, so the screens counsellors use stay fast.
The new platform replaces the old one a piece at a time, so the team keeps working every day while modules move over.
ArchitectureHow the new platform fits together
Simplified view of the target architecture for the rebuild.
ResultsWhat it changed
The same work also produced a set of smaller internal tools around the CRM: Hajiri for HR and attendance, TaskTrack for the IT team, partner bulk messaging, a UK university intake directory and a mock Pre-CAS interview for students.
What’s nextWhere it goes from here
The rebuild continues phase by phase on the new stack. The CRM is private, but I am happy to walk through it on a call.