Off Access, nothing lost
Plenty of UK businesses run on an Access database or a spreadsheet full of macros that someone built years ago. It works, so nobody touches it. The person who understood it may have left.
Microsoft ended support for Office 2021, which includes Access, on 13 October 2026, with no extension. A database that was a key-person risk is now a security risk too.
This blueprint moves it to a secure web app without losing what it does. AI reads the old tables, forms, queries and macros and writes down what each one does in plain English. That becomes the specification. We rebuild against it, run old and new side by side, and switch over when the numbers match.
This is a blueprint, not a client case study. It draws on our work replacing end-of-life platforms.
It works, until it doesn't
These systems fail in ordinary ways. An update breaks a macro. Two people open the file at once and one set of changes is lost. The one person who knows the queries goes on holiday in the busy month.
Unsupported software adds a security risk on top, because the security fixes have stopped.
Four steps, a person in charge
Reads the old system
AI goes through a copy of the database and documents every table, form, query and macro, including the ones nobody remembers.
Agrees the spec with you
You get a plain-English description of what your system actually does, and you correct it. That document is the brief.
Rebuilds it properly
A hosted web app with logins, permissions, an audit trail and backups, built to do what the old one did.
Runs in parallel
The same inputs go through both systems until the outputs match. Only then do you switch.
Same pattern, any size
For a small firm: Job tracking, quoting, stock or membership databases that the business depends on and nobody wants to touch.
For a larger organisation: Departmental tools that grew up outside IT, often in finance and operations, now sitting on an unsupported desktop install.
On your data, first
We start by pointing the AI at a copy of your database and returning the plain-English description of what it does. That document is useful on its own, and it tells us both how big the rebuild is.