Orion

The Problem with Buying Two Tools

As Devonic grew from a solo operation to a small team, the combination of Jira for task tracking and Notion for documentation became expensive and fragmented. Context lived in two places. Switching between them broke flow. Both tools were designed for much larger companies, with features that added complexity without adding value for a team of three.

Orion is Devonic’s answer: a unified internal platform that combines structured task management with lightweight project documentation in one interface.

Task Management

Orion’s task layer follows the Kanban model most developers are familiar with — boards, statuses, assignees, priorities. But without the overhead. No 47-step issue creation flow. No configuration panels that require a certification to understand.

Tasks are created inline, assigned instantly, and moved between stages with a drag. Each task supports a description, checklist, attachments, and a comment thread. That’s the full feature set — deliberately so. Every feature that isn’t there was evaluated and rejected to keep the tool fast to use under daily operational pressure.

Documentation

Every project in Orion has a linked wiki space. Pages support markdown, code blocks, and nested sections. The goal is not to replace a full knowledge base but to keep operational context — architecture decisions, client notes, process steps — directly alongside the work it describes. No more switching tabs to look something up while managing a sprint.

Why Build Instead of Buy

The calculation was simple: Jira + Notion combined cost more per seat per month than the entire cloud infrastructure running all other Devonic products. Beyond cost, ownership matters. Orion’s data lives in Devonic’s own PostgreSQL instance. The schema evolves exactly as the team’s workflow evolves, not around a SaaS vendor’s data model.

There’s also an alignment between what Devonic builds for clients — internal tooling, automation systems, custom software — and the idea that Devonic itself should run on custom software. Orion is a demonstration of the philosophy, not just a cost optimization.

AI: Receipt Scanning & Budget Intelligence

One-Click Expense Registration

Orion includes an expense module that uses Claude’s vision capabilities to eliminate manual data entry entirely.

The flow: take a photo of a receipt or upload an invoice PDF → the AI extracts the structured data in under two seconds:

• Amount: parsed from any format, including handwritten receipts and foreign currency invoices
• Category: inferred from the merchant name, description, or line items (cloud infrastructure, SaaS, contractor, equipment, travel)
• Date: extracted from the document, not the upload timestamp
• Vendor: normalized merchant name, deduplicated against known vendors
• Notes: any relevant detail extracted from the description or line items

The result is pre-filled in a confirmation screen. One click registers the expense. No typing, no manual categorization, no deciding what field goes where.

Budget Forecasting & Optimization

At the start of each month, Orion’s AI generates a budget forecast based on the previous month’s expense data:

• Projects each category’s spend forward based on patterns (recurring SaaS subscriptions, typical infrastructure usage, contractor cadence)
• Flags anomalies: a category running 40% over its rolling average
• Identifies optimization opportunities: duplicate tools, underused subscriptions detected from infrequent invoice patterns, timing mismatches where annual payments could be cheaper than monthly

The output is a plain-language budget brief — not a spreadsheet — that takes two minutes to read and surfaces the two or three decisions worth making this month.

Stack and Status

Vue.js on the frontend for the reactive board, wiki, and expense interfaces. Express + PostgreSQL on the backend — the same stack as every other Devonic product. Claude API for receipt parsing and budget intelligence.

Currently in private use by the Devonic team. No public release is planned; Orion is purpose-built for Devonic’s specific workflows and is not designed as a general-purpose product.