All Work
Custom Platform Web App Product Design

Vantage

A custom strategic advisory platform built for a college counseling firm. Replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets, calendars, and email threads with a single source of truth for client families, students, tasks, timelines, billing, and milestones.

Vantage strategic advisory platform
1
Platform Replacing 5+ Tools
Student Timelines Tracked
0
Spreadsheets Still in Use
2
Task Types: Student + Parent
Overview

A platform built around how they actually work.

Vantage is a custom strategic advisory platform we built for a college counseling firm. The firm was running its entire operation across spreadsheets, shared calendars, and email threads — a system that worked when they had a handful of clients and broke down completely as they scaled.

The platform manages client families, students, tasks, timelines, meeting notes, billing, and milestones — all in one place. Every feature was designed around the firm's actual workflows, not a generic project management model that required constant workarounds.

What It Manages

Everything the firm touches, in one place.

Client Families & Students

Tracks client families and individual students separately, with their own profiles, notes, and task lists tied to each relationship.

Task Management

Student tasks and parent tasks handled separately — deadlines, owners, and status tracked without mixing the two audiences.

Timeline View

Application deadlines, scholarships, campus visits, and test dates in a single timeline view so nothing falls through on a student's critical path.

Built-in Billing & Docs

Invoicing, document templates, and engagement logs built into the platform — no jumping to a separate billing tool mid-workflow.

“I used to start every Monday morning digging through three different spreadsheets just to figure out where each student stood. Now I open Vantage and it’s all there — tasks, timelines, notes, billing. I honestly don’t know how I ran this practice without it. It’s not just easier, it’s completely changed how I show up for my families.”
Kerri B.
College Counselor & Vantage User
The Design Constraint

Counselors aren't software people. The UI had to prove that immediately.

The firm's team are expert advisors, not power users. Every screen had to be immediately legible to someone who didn't want to think about software — they wanted to think about students. We stripped every abstraction that didn't serve the work and built a UI that feels like a well-organized desk, not a dashboard.

Design & Development: Brightridge Creative  |  Custom build · Private deployment

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