The BASH toolkit
Deep-dive guides and training for small businesses and the consultants who serve them
The BASH toolkit — DIY guides for small businesses and advanced technical training for IT consultants, across cloud, ERP, data, finance, AI, and security
Table of Contents
What the toolkit is
The BASH toolkit is our open library of how-to knowledge — the same material we use to guide clients and to train the consultants who deliver the work. It comes in two tracks, because two very different readers need it.
- For your business — plain-English, do-it-yourself guides for owners, operators, and in-house generalists at small and medium businesses. No jargon, no sales pitch. Whether you run a law office, a construction firm, a clinic, a distributor, a retailer, or a nonprofit, the underlying technology needs are more alike than you’d think, and these guides meet you where you are.
- For BASH partners — deep technical training for the consultants who build these systems. Wide and deep on the architectures, frameworks, and trade-offs behind every capability we offer. Written for senior practitioners who are expected to be among the most advanced IT professionals in the room.
Everything here is free to read. The business track helps you decide what to do and how much you can do yourself; the partner track is the reference we hold our own delivery standard to.
For your business
DIY guides and foundations, applicable across every kind of small business. Start with the foundations, then go deep on whatever is slowing you down.
The small-business IT foundation
A plain-English guide to small business IT foundations — accounts, devices, network, files, backup, and security explained without the jargon
Adopting AI in your business without losing control
A plain-English guide to adopting AI in your small business safely, with approved tools, data rules, and a 30-day pilot plan
Moving to the cloud: a small-business playbook
A small-business cloud migration playbook — what moving to the cloud means, honest costs, a phased plan, security basics, and avoiding lock-in
Outgrowing QuickBooks: is it time for ERP?
How to tell whether you have outgrown QuickBooks or just set it up poorly, with a decision checklist and honest ERP cost and timeline
Closing your books faster with automation
A practical guide to a faster month-end close for small businesses using bank feeds, AP automation, reconciliations, and a 5-day close checklist
From spreadsheets to dashboards
Move from spreadsheets to trustworthy dashboards — pick KPIs that matter, connect your systems, and choose Power BI or Looker Studio
Making your software talk to each other
A plain-English guide to connecting your business software with low-code tools or an API so data flows without manual copy-paste
Building a 12-month IT roadmap
How to build a 12-month IT roadmap for your small business — inventory, prioritize by risk and value, budget in ranges, avoid lock-in
The security baseline every small business needs
The six security controls every small business needs first, in priority order, plus a 30-minute self-audit and how they map to cyber insurance
Backups and recovery that actually work
A plain-English guide to small business backups and recovery — the 3-2-1 rule, immutable copies, RTO and RPO, and the restore test that proves it works
For BASH partners
Advanced technical training on the technologies and frameworks behind every service we offer. If you are a consultant partnering with BASH, this is the depth we expect you to work at.
The BASH engagement method
The BASH engagement method and the people-first principles behind it — discovery, target-state architecture, phased delivery, and knowledge transfer
The deterministic-first doctrine
The engineering doctrine behind BASH — deterministic auditable automation as the substrate, AI as an overlay off the critical path of any fact
Running an AI-native consulting practice
How BASH runs an AI-native consulting practice on governed prompts, instruction files, a VS Code prompt orchestrator, and CI build gates
Production AI: RAG, agents, guardrails, and evals
A technical reference for production RAG, tool-use agents, guardrails, and evals when shipping LLM systems for small-business back-office work
Building a native Claude context framework
Turn a repository into a governed AI context framework — instruction files, skills, subagents, commands, and hooks that make AI output repeatable
Easy but hard: qualifying as a BASH partner
Qualify as a BASH consultant by building, not claiming — an open path that starts with a fork and ends with a business tool shipped in public
Cloud landing zones and infrastructure as code
A partner reference for cloud landing zones and infrastructure as code across AWS, Azure, and GCP — accounts, identity, networking, and guardrails
ERP implementation architecture
A senior reference on ERP implementation architecture for SMB manufacturers and distributors — data model, master data, migration, and cutover discipline
Record-to-report automation and controls
A controls-engineering reference for record-to-report automation — close orchestration, reconciliation tooling, consolidation, and COSO-mapped controls
The modern data stack, end to end
A reference architecture for a right-sized modern data stack — ELT ingestion, cloud warehouse choice, dbt transformation, semantic layer, and BI delivery
Integration architecture: APIs, events, legacy
A partner reference for integration architecture — API design, event-driven messaging, the outbox pattern, data sync, OAuth2, and legacy modernization
Security architecture for small business
A partner reference for small-business security architecture — identity as the perimeter, pragmatic zero trust, layered defense, and CIS and NIST mapping
How we practice what we teach
We don’t just publish this material — we run our own operation on it. This site is written, reviewed, illustrated, validated, and shipped through a governed AI pipeline, and the partner track documents that pipeline in full. See [[Running an AI-native consulting practice]] for the tools, prompts, and guardrails behind it, and how an AI-augmented practice runs for the operating model in plain terms.
Where to start
- Not sure what your business needs? Begin with [[The small-business IT foundation]].
- Weighing a specific move — cloud, ERP, AI, better reporting? Jump straight to the matching guide in the business track.
- A consultant looking to partner or level up? Start with [[The BASH engagement method]], then go deep on your specialty.
Have a question a guide doesn’t answer? Book a free consultation and we’ll point you to the right starting place.