CileaRent

Business context

Rental agencies do not get to pause while their software is rewritten. CileaRent runs reservations, contracts, invoicing, fleet rotation, and multi-site coordination for car and utility-vehicle rental businesses — and the version doing that work was a Microsoft Access application grown over years: 162 forms, 142 reports, 39 modules of business logic that nobody could safely delete because some agency, somewhere, still depended on it. A rewrite that dropped a single deposit calculation or invoice layout would surface as a billing dispute, not a bug report.

My responsibility

I work on this as part of Cilea's software team under a B2B contract, contributing across the new web application and the backend services behind it. It is my largest area of contribution at Cilea by volume of work.

Solution

The approach is migration by audit rather than reinterpretation. Every Access form, module, and report was extracted and inventoried, then tracked to one of three states — rebuilt, deliberately not applicable, or explicitly deferred — so that the gap between old and new is a number someone can look at instead of a feeling. The new application is Next.js on PostgreSQL, covering reservations and planning, departures and returns, quotes, customer records, fleet, and invoicing, with a print framework rebuilding the printed documents agencies actually hand to customers. Route protection is verified as part of the audit rather than assumed.

Results

Technology

PostgreSQL because the Access schema was already relational and its constraints were load-bearing business rules worth keeping. A pnpm/Turborepo monorepo lets the rental app share a core package with the other new-generation Cilea applications instead of each one re-solving email, auth, and data access.