What is Flinto?
Flinto is a digital logbook for small service providers. It helps you keep track of offers, appointments, and invoices, all in one system. The idea is simple: Offer → Schedule → Invoice → Done. Flinto doesn't try to replace every form or every email, but it does give you one place to store and complete the core workflow of a job, from first offer to final invoice.
Why does Flinto exist?
Flinto was built to solve the everyday pain of running small service jobs. Offers are often written by hand, once for the customer, once for your own records. Paper forms get lost, smudged, or forgotten in the van. Booking appointments means endless back-and-forth to find a suitable time. And when the job is done, the same details have to be copied again onto an invoice. Every step creates more paperwork, more emails, and more chances for mistakes. Flinto exists to remove friction from that process. Not by doing everything, but by keeping the job in one clean flow.
Who is behind Flinto?
Flinto is developed by Edwin Hommes, a Dutch project manager, agile lead, and technical architect now based in Bern, Switzerland. For over 20 years, Edwin has led critical IT projects across sectors: from emergency services and public transport to HR, e-government, and education. He’s worked with teams of all sizes, often brought in when things were already on fire. But behind all that, he believes in building things that actually work, not just for CIOs, but for the people doing the job. Flinto is not a startup looking for funding. It's a product built out of frustration with bloated systems, broken processes, and missed opportunities to keep things simple. It’s one of several ideas Edwin explores under the motto: "Small, solid, and made to last."
Other Projects & Ideas
Flinto isn’t my only project, just the one most active right now. I also run firstaidpm.com, a platform focused on rescuing troubled IT projects. It’s where I document lessons from years of dealing with impossible deadlines, unclear scope, and slow-burning disasters. Another project is blumen-köniz.ch, built for a friend who wants to start a flower shop but isn’t comfortable with tech. Whether she ends up with a physical store or just a simple online shop, I’m helping her build a digital path that works. And in 2024, I published a personal memoir, about changing careers, burnout, and the weight of expectations in working life. There are always a few things on the side: a soup kitchen project for the colder months, the slow progress on a biography, and a goal to become PMI-certified as a Risk Management Professional. Not all ideas become products, but most of them come from the same place.
Development Philosophy
Building tools for small businesses should start with one thing: respect. Not everyone wants to scale, chase funding, or disrupt an industry. Some just want a stable, honest business that pays the bills and leaves time for a life. Flinto exists to support that kind of business. Clear. Reliable. Useful, without the fluff. I believe software should stay out of your way. It should help you work, not make you work harder. It should fit the way you do things, not the other way around. This project isn’t built for investors or headlines. It’s built for people who want to do good work and get home on time.
What Flinto Is (and Isn’t)
Flinto is not an ERP. It won’t handle your accounting, your payroll, or your email. What it does is help you manage the core workflow of a job: writing an offer, setting an appointment, and sending an invoice, all in one place. It’s built for solo service providers and very small teams who are tired of scattered tools and repetitive paperwork.
What’s Next?
Flinto is still evolving. New features are added step by step, based on what small businesses actually need, not what looks good in a pitch deck. The MVP will support: capturing client data, preparing an offer, sending that offer as a PDF by email, generating an invoice with all details prefilled, and closing the job. A lot of the backend still needs to be built, but we’re working on it. We’re also building a calendar view, based on fixed offers, that can be embedded in any website so customers can easily see your next available time slot. The goal is not to build everything. It’s to build what matters, one step at a time.
Want to Get in Touch?
There’s no fancy contact form yet, that’ll come later. But if you’ve got questions, feedback, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out directly: edwin@firstaidpm.com Just be aware: Flinto is in active development, and I’m still writing code more often than emails.