I am Bartel. Through Rascals I design and build websites, webshops and custom software for businesses at home and abroad — invoicing, stock, ticketing, contracts, online sales. The kind where the numbers have to be right, and where someone has to be able to explain them a year later.
The application is built around a single core, with packages carrying everything around it. Adding something for the next customer, or taking it away, stays easy.
Incoming mail read over IMAP, grouped into conversations and labelled for what it is — a tender, a request for a price, a customer with a problem — without a copy of it leaving the building.
From the first conversation to the server it runs on — a website, a webshop or a full application, the whole way through. There is no hand-off to a second agency halfway through, because that is where the details go missing.
01
A web application, from nothing
The full path: working out what it actually has to do, pinning down what the words mean — what a customer is, when an order counts as paid, what happens next — building it, and putting it on a server that stays up. Laravel and Livewire, because a small team maintaining one codebase beats a large one maintaining three.
02
Rescuing what already exists
An application nobody dares change, a developer who has moved on, a system that has gone years without an update. I take it over, get a test suite and a deployment under it, and make the next change boring again. If you are on the other side of that story — an agency holding a client's codebase with no Laravel people free — it is the same work, bought by the hour instead of by the project.
03
E-invoicing and Peppol
E-invoicing has been mandatory for Belgian B2B invoices since 1 January 2026, and a PDF by email no longer counts. Structured invoicing that passes the official rule set — Peppol, UBL 2.1, EN 16931, checked against exactly the same rules the receiving end applies, before it leaves. Either as an application of its own, or fitted into the software you already use.
04
Payments and subscriptions
Stripe done properly: an order counts as paid when the payment provider confirms it, not when the customer clicks the button, and a duplicate notification is never booked twice. Refunds thought through before launch rather than after the first one. Marketplaces and payouts with Connect where money passes between parties.
05
Integrations and automation
The work that gives somebody back an afternoon, every week: a CRM that fills itself, provider PDFs generated and signed, documents filed where they belong, mail that goes out on time and can be resent. Zendesk, HubSpot, Shopify, amoCRM and anything else with an API — built before, and built to survive the other side changing it.
06
Websites and webshops, on the platform that fits
Next to Laravel there is Magento, Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce — standard work here, not a favour on the side. Building a website or a webshop from scratch, taking a neglected one over, or wiring the shop you have into the stock, invoicing and shipping systems it should have been talking to all along.
07
Hosting and staying alive
One repeatable way to put a change live, so an update is not an adventure. Backups that have actually been restored at least once — a backup nobody has tested is a hope. Plus somebody to call when the thing you depend on stops behaving.
08
Risk management and security audits
A read of the application the way somebody with bad intentions would read it: authentication, authorisation, dependencies, what the server exposes and what happens on the worst day. You get findings ranked by what they would actually cost you, not a scanner report with two hundred lines of noise.
I keep and manage the code on my own servers, so where it lives is not something you have to think about — unless you would rather have it under your own account, which is just as fine. Either way the code is yours, under a licence you can read: nothing is rented back to you and nothing stops working if we stop working together. That is the only honest way to sell software.
Boring where it counts
Money, identity and anything with a legal record gets the dull, well-trodden approach. I would rather spend the interesting ideas on the part of your business that is genuinely unusual.
The words matter
A screen that says "unpaid" when it means "past due date" sends somebody chasing a customer who already paid. Naming things accurately is not polish applied at the end; it is most of the work.
Small, on purpose
You talk to the person who writes the code. No account manager relaying a question, no junior handed the difficult screen, no invoice for a meeting about a meeting.
Working with
Deliberately few tools, known thoroughly.
Fashion is expensive to maintain. I use tools that will still be supported when your application is five years old, and I know them well enough to get out of their way.
Tell me what it is in a few lines. You get a real answer from me — whether I am the right fit, roughly what it would take, and what I would do first. No obligation and no sales sequence.