From spreadsheets to a system that keeps them certified
Nitra Academy is a BeSaCC-VCA recognized examination center that trains hundreds of construction workers every year in safety, equipment operation, and fire prevention. They needed a system to manage bookings, track certifications, and stay audit-ready, on a budget that ruled out enterprise software. I built it from scratch in Zoho Creator, and it's been in daily use ever since.
The context
Nitra Academy isn't just a training company, they're a recognized examination center. That distinction matters. Every diploma they issue gets registered in Belgium's Central Diploma Register (CDR). VCA safety certificates are valid for 10 years and need to be traceable. Companies that send their employees to Nitra face annual audits where incomplete records can cost them their own VCA certification.
Before the system, all of this, bookings, participant data, certificate tracking, company accounts, lived in a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual processes. It worked, until it didn't. As the academy grew past 40 courses across six categories, the administrative overhead started eating into the time they should have been spending on actually training people.
The challenge
Build a complete training management system that handles the full lifecycle: a company books a course, their employees attend, they pass (or don't), certificates are issued, and everyone can look them up years later. Three very different user groups need to interact with the same data:
- Nitra's team: manage course schedules, track attendance, issue certificates, handle invoicing, stay compliant with BeSaCC-VCA and QFOR requirements
- Client administrators: book courses for their employees, track which certificates are valid and which are expiring, manage their company's training records
- Pupils: find and verify their certifications through the public-facing Nitra Academy website
The constraint: no enterprise budget. This had to be built lean, on a platform that Nitra could maintain themselves without needing a developer on retainer.
The approach
I chose Zoho Creator as the platform, a low-code environment that gave us a relational database, custom forms, workflow automation, and a portal layer for external users, all within their existing Zoho One subscription. No additional licensing costs.
The build started with the data model: courses, sessions, participants, companies, certificates, and the relationships between them. Getting this right was critical because everything else, the booking flow, the certificate lookup, the expiry tracking, depends on how cleanly the data connects.
From there, I built outward:
- Internal dashboard for Nitra's team, course management, participant tracking, certificate generation, and compliance reporting
- Company portal (Bedrijfsportaal), a self-service interface where client administrators can book courses, manage their employees, and monitor certification status
- Public certificate search: integrated into nitra-academy.be so pupils can look up their own certifications without needing an account
Built vs. configured, honestly
Nitra Academy runs on Zoho Creator, a low-code platform, and that was a deliberate call, not a shortcut. Low-code is where I could give Nitra a relational data model, three portal experiences, automated certificate generation, and a public lookup in weeks rather than a year, on infrastructure they can maintain themselves without a developer on retainer. Where a build needs real code, I drop to real code; knowing which is which is the job.
A tradeoff I made: I modelled certificates as first-class records rather than fields on a booking. It cost a little more up front, but the expiry tracking, the company overview, and the public certificate lookup all fell out of that one decision for free.
What makes it work
The system isn't clever because it does a lot, it's clever because it connects things that used to be separate. When a participant completes a course, their certificate is generated, linked to their company, given an expiry date, and made searchable on the website. One action, no manual steps.
For client administrators, the portal shows a live overview of their team's certifications: who's covered, who's expiring soon, and who needs to rebook. For a construction company facing annual VCA audits, that's not a nice-to-have, it's the difference between passing and scrambling.
The system handles the full chain: course catalog → booking → attendance → examination → certification → public lookup → expiry tracking → rebooking. All in one place, all connected.
My role
The business problem came from the client. From there, I owned everything: refining it into clear scope and functional requirements, data modeling, UX design, and managing delivery through a junior developer, playing designer, analyst, and project manager simultaneously. The product shipped and has been in daily production use ever since. Post-launch, I continue to iterate based on real usage, tightening workflows and fixing the friction points that only show up once actual humans start clicking actual buttons.
“You can always count on Inti as an enthusiastic entrepreneur, brimming with innovative
ideas. I can highly recommend him.”
Kris Wauters, CEO, Nitra
What I learned
Low-code gets a bad reputation because people try to force enterprise complexity into it. The trick is knowing what to build and what to leave out. An MVP that covers 90% of the workflow and ships in weeks beats a perfect system that takes a year. Nitra didn't need SAP, they needed something that worked, today, and that they could run themselves.
I also learned that the hardest part of building for regulated industries isn't the technology, it's understanding the compliance requirements deeply enough to build them into the system's DNA rather than bolting them on as an afterthought. When your data model respects the regulatory structure, everything downstream just works.