About
A small company with a long memory
Double Byte is a software and consultancy business in Northamptonshire, founded in 2014, with experience in customer communications going back to 2004. Most of what we know was learned on live systems, against deadlines, with real customers waiting for the post.
Our story
Our roots are in infrastructure: Unix and Red Hat Linux systems, where you learn to script everything, to test the recovery plan before you need it, and that the systems nobody notices are the ones working properly.
Since 2004 our work has been document composition. It's an odd corner of IT. The output is something everybody has held in their hands, a bill, a renewal, a bank statement, but very few people know how it's made or how much can go wrong between a data file and a printed page. We've spent twenty-odd years in that gap, across DOC1, PReS, Exstream, Quadient Inspire and Messagepoint, with a lot of Perl, COBOL, Python and SQL holding everything together.
The work has taken us through insurance, banking, pensions, energy, telecoms and the big print and mail bureaux. Some of it is quiet maintenance. A lot of it is the other kind: a tariff change that has to be on every bill by the first of the month, a regulatory letter with a fine attached if it's late, a platform migration where every one of thousands of documents has to come out the same as before.
Double Byte was founded in 2014 as an IT consultancy, to choose the work and do it properly. Most of it has been CCM: building documents, leading migrations, reviewing estates, writing standards and running training courses. Along the way we built a pension scheme's member portal in React and TypeScript, and that changed how we looked at document tools. A lot of them feel their age: powerful, but built for developers rather than for the people who own the wording.
So over the last few years we've developed our own software. ByteDocs is a CCM platform built from the ground up around the problems we've seen on almost every site: the same paragraph copied into forty templates, changes nobody can trace, and data that gets mapped again for every new set of letters.
ByteCompare came out of migration work. The hardest part of moving platforms is proving that thousands of documents still come out the same, so we built the tool we'd always wanted for it: any output against any other, AFP, PDF, HTML or text, letter by letter, with a report to sign off. Neither will be the last thing we build.
A few things we're proud of
Work that made a measurable difference
We don't name clients on this site, but we're happy to talk about any of these in more detail.
£11m a year saved
A long-term paperless communications programme for a motor finance lender, designed and delivered from start to finish. It took around £11m a year out of the print and postage bill.
20% fewer calls
A redesign of an energy supplier's business bills to make the VAT easier to follow. The same supplier's household billing system, which we designed and built, has won an industry award.
Cards matched to letters
Credit card mailings for a large financial company, with every card matched to the right letter using AFP metadata.
Every format, same day
Large print, braille and colour-adjusted documents, so customers who need a different format get the same letter as everyone else, at the same time.
How we like to work
We're small on purpose. When you work with Double Byte you get the people who will actually do the work, and they've usually seen your problem, or something very like it, before.
We'd rather tell you early that something won't work than find out together at the end. And we leave things in a state where your own team, or anyone else, can pick them up.
Check against the real thing
New output is compared with the old, document by document, before anyone signs it off.
Plain English
Proposals, specs and documentation that business users can actually read.
Leave it maintainable
Standards, version control and notes, so the next person isn't starting from scratch.
Straight answers
If something isn't a good fit, for us or for the platform, we'll say so.
Want to talk it through?
An estate review, a migration plan, a React project, or a look at ByteDocs or ByteCompare. We're always happy to have a conversation first.