From Chaos to Control: How I Built Vivalis a Bespoke Cost Tracking System to Manage Thousands in Daily Spend

Vivalis, the parent company behind cosmetics brands Collection 2000, Constance Carroll, and MeMeMe, faced a complex operational challenge: tracking and approving vast amounts of point-of-sale and estate management costs across multiple brands and geographies. With thousands of components and invoices passing through the system daily, they needed a bespoke solution to bring clarity, control, and speed to their financial workflows. That’s when they came to me.

The Challenge:

Each of Vivalis’ brands had unique operational demands. Collection 2000, a high-volume teen-focused line, moved quickly through Boots across the UK. Constance Carroll catered to international markets, and MeMeMe launched as a premium line in Superdrug’s flagship Oxford Street store. Coordinating packaging, delivery, and estate costs for such a diverse portfolio meant dealing with high volumes of supplier invoices and complex sign-off processes.

The existing tools were fragmented, manual, and error-prone—lacking visibility, slowing decision-making, and making cost control almost impossible at scale.

The Strategy:

I acted as Business Analyst and Delivery Lead, working directly with the Vivalis team to define their needs and translate them into a scalable system architecture. After in-depth analysis and interviews with stakeholders, I designed a plan of action and personally wrote all user stories for the build.

The result was Costtracker—a proprietary, browser-based platform designed to:

• Track and approve all incoming cost components across brands, SKUs, and suppliers

• Enable multi-tier, 4-eyes approval workflows, ensuring financial accountability

• Support rapid modifications, such as new cost dimensions or updated sign-off rules

• Generate real-time reports for estate and point-of-sale cost control

• Securely manage tens of thousands of pounds of daily invoices

• Avoid subscription fees by remaining fully owned and controlled in-house

Because it was purpose-built, Vivalis didn’t need to wait for a third-party vendor to prioritise their requests—changes could be made quickly, in direct response to business need.

The Results:

Costtracker brought instant and lasting impact to Vivalis operations:

• Fully online, secure platform available to key stakeholders across teams

• Multi-tier sign-off process ensured robust compliance and accountability

• Unified view of POS and estate costs across all brands and territories

• Daily invoice handling streamlined and simplified

• Reports now accessible at the click of a button

• Faster change implementation with no licensing or platform dependency

Conclusion 

By building Costtracker, I helped Vivalis take control of complex, high-volume financial workflows—freeing up time, improving accuracy, and reducing risk. If you’re struggling with fragmented tools or generic SaaS that doesn’t quite fit, a custom system might be the answer.

Let’s talk about building something that’s built around you—not the other way round.

Following the successful development and rollout of Costtracker for Vivalis, I’ve been asked a number of questions about how the system worked, why it was custom-built, and what made it so effective for a fast-moving, multi-brand business. Below, I’ve answered the most common queries to help you understand the thinking behind the platform and how it could be adapted for your organisation.