Replacing Salesforce with AppSheet: What Hackney Council's Trading Standards Team Actually Needed

Stack: AppSheet · Google Sheets · Google Apps Script · Google Drive · Google Workspace

Salesforce is a brilliant product. Genuinely. For the right organisation, at the right scale, with the right budget and the right development team behind it, it's transformative.

The Trading Standards team at the London Borough of Hackney wasn't afforded these ideal conditions.

What they had was a Salesforce instance that had been shaped, over time, by people who'd since left, into something that technically worked but practically didn't. Cases were being managed. Inspections were being logged. Notifications from Citizens Advice were arriving. But the system sat between the officers and their work like a toll booth. Slow, opaque, and expensive to change. When we asked how officers felt about it, the word "Salesforce" appeared in sentences I won't reproduce here.

The brief was simple on the surface: replace it. The reality was more interesting.

The work isn't at a desk

Trading Standards Officers don't sit in offices all day. They're in vans. They're on high streets. They're walking through business premises, checking weights and measures, product safety, licensing compliance. The unglamorous machinery of consumer protection that most people never think about until it fails.

That's the part the previous system didn't understand. A case management tool that lives in a browser, on a desktop, is useless when you're standing in the back of a shop trying to log an inspection. You need it on a tablet. You need it offline-capable. You need it to not require a support ticket every time the form changes

That shaped everything.

What we built

The replacement was built on AppSheet, Google's low-code application platform, backed by Google Sheets as the data source. Before anyone raises an eyebrow at Google Sheets: it's the right call at this scale. The data volumes here don't need a relational database. They need auditability, accessibility, and zero infrastructure overhead for the council's IT team. Google Sheets gives you all three. AppSheet puts a proper UI on top of it.

The platform does four things well:

Case creation and management. Officers create and track cases from intake through to resolution. Status, case type, assigned officer, linked premises. All of it in one place. No more cross-referencing spreadsheets and emails.

Case allocation. Supervisors can assign cases to individual officers, balance workloads, and see what's live across the team at a glance. That visibility alone was worth the project.

Inspection logging in the field. This is the part that mattered most. Officers pull up a case on their tablet, conduct the inspection, and log it on-site. Findings, observations, follow-up actions. AppSheet's mobile interface handles this cleanly. No laptop required. No "I'll log it when I'm back at the office". No scanning and uploading paper inspection forms as PDFs into the system.

Citizens Advice notification import. Citizens Advice regularly sends Trading Standards teams notification data about consumer complaints and referrals, the intelligence that generates a significant portion of case load. This data arrives as XML. It used to get downloaded by FTP and then uploaded into Salesforce, which parsed the data into the system.

We replatformed that into Google Workspace. A user dumps the XML files into a folder on Googe Drive. Then, when they hit the import button, an Apps Script pipeline pulls the XML, transforms it, and loads it directly into the Google Sheet, where it triggers automatic case population. The officer opens AppSheet in the morning and the cases are already there.

The infrastructure behind the curtain

The case management layer is the part users interact with. The Apps Script layer is the part that keeps the gears moving.

Two scripts do the quiet work. The first handles the Citizens Advice import, XML parsing, field mapping, deduplication logic, and a clean write into the data source. The second runs scheduled backups of the Google Sheet, exporting snapshots to a designated folder in Google Drive. It's not glamorous infrastructure. It's not meant to be. It's the kind of thing that only gets noticed when it breaks, which, built well, it doesn't.

This matters more than it sounds. Public sector case management data isn't just operationally important; it's potentially evidential. Officers build cases. Cases go to enforcement. Enforcement requires an audit trail. The backup regime isn't a nice-to-have. It's the mechanism that makes the whole system defensible.

Our honest assessment

AppSheet has limits. If the council's case volumes grew tenfold, or if the data model needed complex relational joins, or if reporting requirements became sophisticated, we'd have a different conversation. Google Sheets is not a database. It's a very good spreadsheet that happens to work well as a lightweight data source at this scale.

What AppSheet gave the team wasn't enterprise-grade architecture. It was a tool they could actually use, on their tablets, in the field. In local government, where technology budgets are under perpetual pressure and IT capacity is stretched, that's not a compromise. It's the point.

The officers adopted it. That's the real test. A system that nobody uses isn't a system. It's dead expenditure of tax payer money.

There's a version of this project where someone decided the council needed a proper case management platform, went through an eighteen-month procurement process, spent six figures, and ended up with something that Trading Standards officers quietly ignored in favour of their own spreadsheets. We've seen that project. It's more common than it should be.

This wasn't that. It was a focused tool, built for the people who use it, deployed in weeks not years, on infrastructure the council already owns and understands.

Consumer protection work is important. It deserves tools that get out of the way and let officers do their jobs. That's what we built.