Turning Excel Chaos into a Controlled System for Interior Contractors - HUSK DESIGN
The Product
Husk Master Planner is an integrated site- and project-management system built for interior and remodelling contractors in Korea. In practice, the industry runs on fragmented Excel files — a master workbook of construction methods, separate worksheets per site, estimate documents, purchase orders, labour schedules, work instructions, and settlement sheets — all maintained manually, often across different versions on different staff computers. Husk replaces that spread with a single-file web application that pulls from a single master dataset and automatically outputs every downstream document.
Role & Fit
I was engaged as an external consultant on requirements definition and system design. The contractor had deep knowledge of how interior work actually gets done on site and years of accumulated estimate data in Excel. What they lacked was a structured way to convert that operational knowledge into a system specification that a developer could build against. My job was to sit between the operational reality and the technical build — translating how the business actually runs into a data model and module structure that the team could execute.
Context
Interior contractors in Korea share a common operational pattern. Estimates are written from a construction-method master that each company maintains in its own Excel. Once a project begins, the same data has to be reused across purchase orders, labour scheduling, daily work instructions, and final settlement — but because each document is its own Excel file, the data is copied, modified, and eventually drifts. Errors compound. Margin leaks. Staff spend hours reconciling numbers that should have come from one source.
Challenges
Three problems to solve. First, the construction-method master was the source of truth, but had an inconsistent structure — missing values, sub-header rows polluting data, and inconsistent classification. Second, project-level and company-level data were intermingled, making it unclear what should be shared across sites and what should be isolated to a single project. Third, the team needed the system to be simple enough to maintain without a dedicated IT department — no build steps, no frameworks that the staff could not open and read.
Approach & Execution
I led the requirements definition with the operator side of the team. We mapped the current Excel workflow end-to-end, identified which fields were genuinely master data versus project-specific, and defined a five-level cascading structure as the backbone of all downstream documents. The calculation logic — subtotal = (material + labour + overhead) × quantity — was locked as the single formula across all modules so that numbers would not diverge. On the system design side, I recommended a single HTML file with localStorage for solo use and an optional Node.js server with WebSocket for multi-user sites, with last-write-wins as the concurrency policy. The architecture was deliberately minimal so the contractor's team could maintain it themselves.
Outcomes
The resulting system replaces the scattered Excel workflow with one source of truth. A site manager enters the worksheet once using cascading dropdowns from the master, and the estimate (by space and by trade), purchase orders, labour schedule, work instructions, and final settlement are generated from the same dataset. Errors drop because there is no copy-paste between files; margins become visible because every line item traces back to the master; and the team no longer reconciles numbers manually at the end of a project.