Quenby took 17 admin tools off the engineering backlog

Admin panels on the roadmap

Quenby’s engineering team spent about a fifth of every sprint on internal tools. Finance needed a way to raise a card limit. Customer success wanted a view of upcoming renewals. Risk asked for a screen to freeze a card without filing a ticket. Each request was reasonable, and each one pushed the product roadmap back. The tools built in a hurry also had no audit trail. When the regulator asked who had raised a particular limit, an engineer had to search application logs by hand.

Theo Marchetti, VP Engineering, added it up in early 2025: roughly 1,900 hours a year went to screens that only employees would ever see.

Engineers write the rules, teams build the tools

Instead of building each tool, Theo’s team wrote the rules once. They connected Quenby’s Postgres ledger replica, Stripe and Salesforce to Chamfer, then wrote Specs in plain English: card numbers are always masked, any limit change above $10,000 needs a finance sign-off, and nobody writes to the ledger directly. Writing and reviewing them took one afternoon. The team then tested each rule by prompting for a tool that broke it and confirming the build was blocked.

Then they handed the Bench to the teams who had been filing tickets. Finance built Card Controls in an afternoon: search a card, freeze it, change its limit or reissue it. Customer success built a Renewals Board that shows every contract due in the next 90 days, with account health from Salesforce and an owner on each card. Risk built a card freeze screen of its own the following week.

Engineers still review what ships. Every release goes through a Sign-off with a diff, and each app’s source syncs to a GitHub repository, so code review happens where engineers already work.

Controls a regulator can read

Quenby’s payments regulator audits it every year. The Logbook gives the auditors a single export with every limit change, who approved it and when. Access follows Okta groups, so a contractor’s access ends on the day their contract does. The security team runs a monthly access review in a Chamfer app, and the results go straight into the audit file.

“The first audit after the switch took two days instead of two weeks,” Theo says. “Every question had a row in the Logbook.”

What changed

• 1,900 engineering hours returned in the first year

• 17 admin tools moved off the engineering backlog

• Admin changes shipped in 2 days on average, down from 3 weeks

Eight people across finance, risk and customer success now build on Chamfer. Engineering reviews their releases, owns the Specs and spends the rest of its time on the card platform.