KeelOps

Not a CRM

Your company's dashboard, with the work at its centre.

Deals, projects, administrative deadlines, hours and customer requests: five natures of the same task, stitched together. On your own server, or in the cloud at a price you will not notice.

Public demo with made-up data. To be published as free software (AGPL) shortly.

My day: overdue and due tasks, the shared queue to pick up, and waiting tickets

Why the name

You never see the keel. It is what holds everything else up.

The keel is the beam that runs from bow to stern along the bottom of a ship. The masts rest on it, and so do the cabins, the cargo and the crew. Nobody looks at it, nobody photographs it; but if it does not hold, nothing holds — and without it a ship neither runs straight nor sails into the wind.

For a small company, business software should be exactly that: the structure under everyone’s daily work, solid and silent. Not one more thing to look at, but the thing that holds the others up and keeps the course.

From the painting by Fitz Henry Lane, The Golden State Entering New York Harbor, 1854 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0), animated by us.

Where we come from

Two excellent tools, and a gap in between.

For our small team we paid about $2,500 a year: one tool held the administrative calendar and the deals, the other the projects and the hours. We used a fraction of both, and keeping everything on one of them did not work: ClickUp as a CRM was awkward for administration and for the sales people, and Monday for projects always left gaps against the way we actually work. And above all: a won deal became a project by hand; a delivery became an invoice to record by hand, if anybody remembered; a customer request arrived from a third program altogether.

A small company's work does not live inside a tool: it lives in the handovers between one tool and the next. That is where things fall. KeelOps was built to close that gap — not from a blank page, but from real data, imported from Monday, ClickUp, osTicket and customers' spreadsheets.

The thread that holds it together

The software does the handovers, not your memory.

Deal won → invoice

The task for administration is born by itself: same title, same attachments, on the right person's desk.

Deal won → project

With the salesperson already a member and the kick-off assigned to the manager you pick. The link holds both ways.

Ticket → project task

The customer’s request lands where the work happens, not on an island. They follow it from their own portal.

Deadlines that come back

The hardest part of administrative work, and here it is a single rule: every day, every week, the 15th of the month, the first Tuesday, the last day of the month, every two months, quarterly, twice a year, yearly. Occurrences generate themselves sixty days ahead; close one and the next takes its date.

Hours on any task

A development delivery or a tax deadline: you log them where you work, and the reports come out without reconstructing anything.

A task converts

From deadline to deal, from deal to project: it changes nature, not identity. The hours logged stay with it.

What it does

Six areas, not forty modules.

The screens below come from the public demo: made-up data, real product.

My day

What is late, what is due today, what is coming; the shared queue to pick up; open deals and waiting tickets. The counters are also the filter — mine, supervised, personal — and every tile moves and collapses the way you want.

The My day screen

Deals

A pipeline by stage with the value and the weighted value at the top of each column, a monthly forecast, the reason a deal was lost. Companies and contacts live here, not in a separate CRM.

The deal pipeline, by stage

Projects

Members with roles, tasks and subtasks, prerequisite sequences, progress; release notes are written from the work closed in the period.

The project list with progress

Timesheet

A month or week grid, hours on any task you can see, reminders, month closing, per-customer reports. Absences come from the company calendar, so the coverage figure tells the truth.

The timesheet grid

Tickets and customer portal

The customer opens the request from their portal and sees only their own; inside the company it is a project task like any other, with hours and a supervisor.

The tickets area

Administrative calendar

Administrative work and recurrences — the thing no other tool did well for us: subscriptions, filings, invoices that come back, with the rules written in plain words and a preview of the next five occurrences before you save. As an agenda, a table or a kanban; filters and sorting remember themselves.

The administrative calendar as a board

Plugins

The core is free. The pro plugins add what takes real work.

A plugin loads inside the application: same authentication, same permissions, same look — light and dark theme included. No extra process to keep alive, no tokens to hand out.

Personal boards · free

Everyone’s own kanban, with the columns they choose and templates. They appear on the dashboard next to work tasks.

Task map · free

The network of a project’s tasks: themes from the text, hierarchy, time windows, co-work. It rebuilds itself.

MCP connector · free

Claude, ChatGPT and Mistral read KeelOps with your identity and inside your perimeter. No tool writes.

Attendance · pro

Holidays, leave, sickness and remote work per person and per team: everyone corrects their own days, a manager those of their group.

MCP connector: free and pro side by side

Both versions answer on the same address: an assistant already connected never notices.

What it doesFreePro
Read tasks, deals, projects, tickets, hours, contactsyesyes
The identity and permissions of the person connectedyesyes
Attached documents (PDF, Word, text)extracted textfull extraction, spreadsheets and presentations included
Google Drive per usereveryone connects their own account; Docs, Sheets and Slides are really read
Privacy filter (pseudonymisation)the names of people, customers, companies, products, VAT numbers and e-mails become stable placeholders before the text leaves: on CPU, in house
Search inside the documentsfull text, with the passages and where they come from
Similar documentsby content, with the models in house
The history of a projectin time order, inside a window you ask for, with the versions of the same document

In the cloud the pro plugins are included: there are no modules to buy and no credits to top up.

Artificial intelligence

AI in house, on by default.

The models are local and on by default: they run on the company’s own machine, and no text, document or logged hour leaves for an outside service. Before we trust a model with a field we measure it against the dumbest possible answer — three tasks that lost stayed out — and what remains proposes: the decision belongs to whoever reads.

  • A vector index of the tasks: every task is indexed by words and by meaning, so search finds what is written another way, too.
  • Summaries, recaps and reports written from the real content: a project’s release notes from the work closed in the period, the state of a deal from its documents, the reader’s own day.
  • A won deal: it reads the documents and proposes the project and the first tasks.
  • Release notes written from the work that was closed.
  • The absence calendar, understood by a 350-million-parameter model we trained ourselves, always on CPU.
The MCP connector page

The MCP connector plugs in the assistant you already use — Claude, ChatGPT, Mistral — and it reads KeelOps with your identity. The pro version goes further: it opens the attachments and the documents on Google Drive, extracts their content (PDF, Word, spreadsheets, slides) and pseudonymises it before sending. The names of customers and people, companies and products become stable placeholders — [[PERSON_1]] is always the same person — so Claude and ChatGPT get the reasoning and not your customer list. The assistant is told the filter is on, and which entities are masked.

Open source

Coming to GitHub, under the AGPL.

KeelOps has been in production in a real company for months. We are preparing the code for publication: AGPL-3.0, a Docker install, documentation in English. Install it yourself and pay nothing; or take it in the cloud and stop thinking about it, with every plugin included.

Live demo

Ten minutes, with made-up data.

The demo is a separate installation in every respect — another server, another database, other data — at demo.keelops.it. There are five profiles: administrator, sales, development, administration and a portal customer, so you can see what changes from one role to the next.

What to look at: a developer’s day; a pipeline with its weighted value; a project with its subtasks; a month of timesheet; a request opened by a customer that became a task; the task map of a project (the ⋯ menu on the project page).

Ask for the demo credentials with the form below, or find them on the demo page itself.

Keep in touch

We write when there is news. That is all.

One message when the code is on GitHub, one when the cloud opens for sign-ups. Nothing else, and one click to unsubscribe.

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