True Holiday Admin Dashboard

Designed and developed a full-featured company admin dashboard for True Holiday as a centralized internal management system, built to replace inefficient manual spreadsheets and give business owners a clear, real-time view of their day-to-day company operations. I was brought onto this project as the Laravel developer, tasked with building a custom employee and order management system from scratch — not an off-the-shelf tool — because the business needed role-specific views for admins, managers, and staff, and none of the generic dashboard products on the market matched how the company actually operated. The result is an internal admin dashboard covering employee tracking, order lifecycle management, and role-based access control in one system.

Built a robust Laravel and MySQL admin dashboard featuring multi-level Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for admins, managers, and staff, so each user only sees the data and actions relevant to their role. Delivered real-time employee and team tracking, end-to-end orders and sales lifecycle management from creation to completion, and custom filterable data tables designed to handle growing data volumes cleanly without slowing down as the business scaled. Implemented secure role-based session authentication, protected routes at the middleware level, and an intuitive admin UI built with Bootstrap and jQuery, optimised specifically for non-technical staff who had never used an internal software system before. The dashboard was designed around how the business actually works day-to-day rather than a generic CRM template, which made adoption by staff far smoother than a typical off-the-shelf tool would have been.

The hardest part wasn't any single feature — it was designing a permission model that stayed maintainable as more views and actions got added, instead of scattering role checks across every controller. I centralised access control in dedicated RBAC middleware so each route declares what it needs once, rather than re-checking roles inline everywhere. The second challenge was migrating years of spreadsheet-based employee and order records into a clean relational schema without losing history — that meant writing careful data-mapping scripts and validating row counts before and after import. I also had to keep the filterable order tables fast as data grew, which meant moving filtering and pagination to the server side instead of loading everything into the browser. Because this is an internal business tool handling employee and order data, security wasn't optional — every route and query needed to assume a user might try to access data outside their role, not just handle the happy path.